Noosha Uddin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science. Her research interests include labor migration, citizenship, and energy politics in the Persian Gulf, and her dissertation examines the interplay of drivers at the migrant, state, and international levels that lead to substantial reform of the region’s guest worker-sponsorship system (kafala, in Arabic). Noosha also has research experience in energy and environmental security and in political and economic implications to national energy transitions. In addition to her affiliation with the Broom Center, Noosha is a graduate assistant of the Energy Governance and Political Economy (EGAPE) Lab at UCSB as part of the institution’s 2035 Initiative, and a member of the Center for Middle East Studies (CMES). 

Taft Crowley is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science. His subfield concentrations are political economy and comparative politics. Through these lenses Taft focuses on issues of migration, land reform, demographic imbalances, and the politics of LGBTQ Americans. His current project aims to understand the connection between land reform and migration in Central America. This project hopes to better explain the constraints and choices of potential migrants in the Northern Triangle, with the hope that such work can better inform policy choices in migrant origin and destination states. Taft’s other work has sought to understand the politics resulting from male surpluses in India and changing group solidarity within cis-gay men in the US.

Emily Kracht is an Anthropology graduate student, specializing in Archaeology. Emily studies the Indigenous peoples of the early Caribbean, but has broad interests in ceramic technology, archaeometry, marine adaptations, exchange networks, and outreach. She specifically focuses on archaeometric methods including ceramic analysis, stable isotope analysis, and radiocarbon dating. She uses these techniques to understand migration, colonization, social identity, and exchange of these early peoples. Emily’s current research studies how the elemental composition of pottery can be used to track early exchange and trade networks among regional and microregional centers.

Emily holds a BA and BS in Anthropology and Chemistry, respectively, from the University of Florida (UF). She also has spent time as a lab technician and collections assistant at UF and the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Florida.

Esaú is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at UC Santa Barbara and part of the Population Health in Geography (PHiG) research group. Esaú's broad research interests include immigration, health outcomes, policy, and spatial data and analysis. He received a B.A. in Political Science from CSU Bakersfield in 2018, and a Master in Public Policy from UC Riverside in 2020. During his time at UC Riverside, Esaú’s research focused on developing a survey to measure the effects that pro-immigrant and restrictive policies have on the integration experiences and health outcomes of Latinx immigrants living in California.