Stephanie L. Canizales, Ph.D.
Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Sociology
School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts
Stephanie L. Canizales, Ph.D., is a researcher, author, and professor currently appointed to the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Merced. Stephanie’s research specializations include international migration and immigrant integration; children, youth, and families; inequality, poverty, and mobility; and race and ethnicity. She uses in-depth interviews and ethnographic research methods to understand the causes of Latin American-origin migration to the U.S. and how immigrant children, youth, and families fare once there. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Stephanie is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants whose experiences growing up as unaccompanied youth in Los Angeles inform her scholarship and motivate her commitment to public sociology and scholar-advocacy.
Ricardo D. Castro, Ph.D.
Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Mechanical Engineering
School of Engineering
Ricardo de Castro, Ph.D. has research focused on electric and robotic vehicles and he is interested in combining power conversion with advanced control and optimization methods as a means of achieving high energy efficiency, durability, and reliability of energy storage systems. Vehicle automation is another area of his research, with particular emphasis on safe motion planning and resilient control.
Throughout his career, he has been involved in the development of several electric vehicles for research and educational purposes, featuring car-to-car communications and x-by-wire actuators (ROMO), multiple electric motors (uCar), and FPGA-based high-performance control units (VEP).
Jeanette Cobian Iñiguez, Ph.D.
Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Mechanical Engineering
School of Engineering
Jeanette Cobian-Iñiguez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Merced. Prior to her current position, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley working on smoldering fire behavior of simulated wildland fuels. She completed a Ph.D. at the University of California, Riverside, an M.S. from Cal State LA where she was an LSAMP Bridge to the Doctorate Fellow and a B.S. at UC San Diego. Jeanette’s interests are in advancing the basic science of fire behavior in the wildland through controlled experiments and in contributing to applied science of wildfire behavior by using remote sensing and data science. She co-organizes the weekly interdisciplinary California Fire Science Seminar series. Jeanette’s community and K-12 outreach interests are bilingual (English and Spanish) science communication and increasing the participation of future generations in STEM careers.
