Nick Marantz, an assistant professor of urban planning and public policy, and Ana Muñiz, an assistant professor of criminology, law and society, won Hellman Fellowships, which are dedicated to supporting the research and creative activities of promising early-career academics.
The Hellman Fellows Fund was established in 2013 with a $1.25 million five-year grant, and UCI has bestowed 53 fellowships since then. The program has been renewed for 2018 to 2020 with a $750,000 grant. Each fellowship comes with up to $50,000 for the awardee. Four other faculty from UCI were awarded fellowships this academic year.
Marantz studies local governance and the regulation of the built environment, particularly the efficacy of policy interventions intended to reduce inequality, such as those to improve housing affordability. The Hellman funding will support his research on the impact of public policy on apartment housing development in California’s coastal counties. He joined UCI in 2014, after earning a Ph.D. in urban & regional planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a J.D. at Harvard Law School.
Muñiz was awarded a Hellman Fellowship for her project on the creation of a digital infrastructure to classify and surveil immigrants. She will employ institutional ethnography, qualitative field methods and archival analysis to map the increasing interconnection between criminal and immigrant databases; information sharing among local, federal and international law enforcement agencies; and automated risk assessment programs that inform the gang classification of immigrants. Muñiz will also explore the implications of intelligence gathering and gang classification for racialized social control. She completed master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology at UCLA prior to her arrival at UCI in 2016.