Jimena Rico-Straffon is a Ph.D. student in Economics at UC Santa Barbara. She holds a Master of Public Policy from Duke University and a B.A. in Economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). Her professional experience includes conducting research on inequality, deforestation, monetary policy, and environmental policy at Mexico's central bank, the World Wildlife Fund US, and Mexico's National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change. Her research interests include natural resource economics, development, gender and racial inequality, and intergenerational social mobility. Her current research focuses on forest policy, as well as on the role of skin color on teenagers’ aspirations and investments in education.

Grants, Awards and Distinctions:

Deacon Fellowship, UCSB Economics Department

UC MEXUS- CONACYT Doctoral Fellowship (2019-2024)

UC Berkeley and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Diversity Fellowship for participating in the Berkeley/Sloan Summer School in Energy and Environmental Economics, $1,000

CAF Development Bank of Latin America, Research Grant on Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, co-PI, $6,000

Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, UCSB Economics (2023) 

Ruth Morales is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics at UC Santa Barbara. Before starting at UCSB, she earned both a B.A. and M.A. in economics from San Diego State University. Her primary research interests are in labor economics and public economics. She is especially interested in investigating outcomes related to education, crime, and immigration policies. Her current lines of research focus on the demographic effects of the Bracero Program and on the impact of college-level remedial education reform in the community college system.

I am a graduate student in the Integrative Anthropological Sciences program, and I graduated with my bachelor’s degrees in biological anthropology and environmental studies at UCSB. My primary interests include human behavior ecology, especially in parental investment and demographic transition, and variability selection hypothesis. My current research focuses on examining over-investment behavior, especially in developing countries, through major concepts of HBE such as adaptive trade-offs and optimality model.

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics at UC Santa Barbara. I graduated from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea with B.A and M.A in Economics. My research interests include education, labor economics along with applied econometrics. Currently, I am working on the project about the impact of international students on the US higher education.