Madhumitha Krishnan

Madhumitha Krishnan is a junior studying political science and history, with specializations in comparative politics and the history of law and government. She is interested in studying democratization and the role of judicial institutions in strengthening or weakening democracies. She is also generally passionate about migrant rights and creating systemic political and social change by empowering minority communities to utilize established political and legal processes. She will be studying Russian in the Kyrgyz Republic and chose to study Russian for the interesting questions the post-Soviet space raises about the democratization […]

Ramil Mercado

Ramil graduated from UC Berkeley in December 2019 with a BA in Political Science and Asian Studies, and a minor in Southeast Asian studies. He is passionate about Southeast Asian culture and politics, specifically Maritime Southeast Asia. He is learning Indonesian in order to effectively communicate and connect with people across Indonesia and Timor-Leste, as well as with those who speak Malay in Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore. He hopes to use the language skills that he will gain this summer in his graduate studies as well as within the realm […]

Mariel Aquino

Mariel Aquino is a fourth-year Data Science major with a concentration in Linguistics. She has always enjoyed traveling and studying foreign languages and will combine this with her interests in natural language processing, machine learning, and machine translation as a full-time NLP engineer next year. Her past three semesters of linguistics researchin Ndengeleko, an endangered Bantu language spoken in Tanzania, developed her interest in East African languages. As businesses expand to areas such as Southeast Asia and East Africa, Mariel plans to take what she’s learned in the program to […]