President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
Modeled after a program first implemented within the University of California System, the President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program seeks applicants whose research, teaching, and service will contribute to diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity in higher education and at the University of Maryland. The President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is interested in scholars with the potential to bring to their research and teaching the critical perspective that comes from their educational background or understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education. This program, in particular, encourages applicants who would increase representation in campus units where women and minorities are underrepresented.
Meet the Fellows
Desi Jones
Desi Jones is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology. She received her PhD in Psychological Sciences from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2023. Desi’s research focuses on how autistic people are perceived by their peers, how these perceptions differ for autistic people from underrepresented groups, and how to reduce stigma among non-autistic people. She is also interested in using qualitative methods to better understand the experiences of autistic people with intersecting identities, with an emphasis on Black autistic people.
Katharine Khanna
Katharine (Kate) Khanna is a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 2023 and her B.A. in Anthropology and French Studies from Brown University in 2013. Broadly, her work focuses on gender inequality, status processes, and social identity. Kate is particularly interested in the dynamic nature of gender attitudes across social contexts, which she studies using a combination of survey experiments, in-depth interviews, and survey analysis. Current projects examine the durability of gender categories, the relational and intersectional nature of gender attitudes, and the social and symbolic consequences of espousing egalitarian beliefs.
Jayson Maurice Porter
Jayson Maurice Porter was born in Maryland like his great grandmother Winona Amanda Spencer Lee (1909-2012), who worked family farm land in Eastern Shore until the early 2000s. His research specializes in environmental politics, science and technology studies, food systems, and racial ecologies in Mexico and the Americas. He is an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Outside of academia, he loves to connect with other black environmental educators, write creative non-fiction stories, and design environmental-literacy curricula for broader audiences of all ages.
Kevan Aguilar
Kevan Antonio Aguilar is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History. He received his Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on transnational social movements, race formation, immigration, and working-class culture in twentieth-century Mexico. At the University of Maryland, he will work on his book manuscript, Revolutionary Encounters: Race, Ideology, and Exile in Mexico and Spain, which examines the proliferation of transnational communitarian traditions between Mexico’s laboring classes and political refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War. He will also begin research on a second book-length project documenting the activities of Mexican and Mexican American anarchists from the 1920s through the 1970s. Aguilar’s research has received support from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His work has been published in the Journal of Latin American Studies (2021), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mexican History and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the edited volume, Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (Pluto Press, 2017).
Marlaina Martin

David Illingworth

Riva Riley

Gurneet Sangha

Katherine Joyner
Jasmón Bailey

Andrés Buxo-Lugo

Tamanika Ferguson
Dr. Tamanika Ferguson is a University of Maryland President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication. She earned a doctorate in Communication, Culture and Media Studies with a joint certificate in Women's Studies from Howard University. She also earned a Master's in Africana Studies and Sociology and a Bachelor’s in Africana Studies from the California State University. Dr. Ferguson is a qualitative researcher and is currently working on several research projects, including a journal and book manuscript under the mentorship of Dr. Shawn Parry-Giles. A scholar of the incarcerated women's public sphere, Dr. Ferguson studies communication and media by and about incarcerated women and their feminist allies. She is working on a book manuscript entitled, Coming from The Inside: Women in Prison Speak that examines incarcerated women’s advocacy and media activism
Dr. Ferguson's interest in women's incarceration builds on her earlier grassroots organizing and non-profit work and personal and family experiences with the juvenile and criminal justice systems in California. She is committed to expanding the voices and stories of imprisoned women to continue the conversation about gender injustices, state accountability, social punishment and policy reforms. She is a yoga practitioner, learning professional, book enthusiast, mentor, feminist and cultural studies pedagogy researcher and aspiring educator from Los Angeles, California.
Mojhgan Haghnegahdar

Minxuan He

Michelle Magalong

Magdalene Ngeve

Samuel Braunfeld
I. Augustus Durham
I. Augustus Durham is the President's Postdoctoral Fellow in English. He completed his Master’s and doctorate degrees in English, as well as certificates in African & African American Studies, Feminist Studies, and College Teaching, at Duke University. His book project takes up black studies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to examine how melancholy is a catalyst for genius which is itself revelatory of the black feminine/maternal. Durham has published work in CAA Reviews, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, and Journal of Religion and Health; he also has a forthcoming essay on the film Moonlight in an edited collection on the expressive art of Tarell Alvin McCraney (Northwestern University Press, 2020).
Morgan Edwards
Maria M. Galano
Eva Hageman
Ana Ndumu
Erica Coates
Erica Coates is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Family Science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland. She earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of South Florida, and completed her clinical internship at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the role of nonresidential father involvement and coparenting in child development among African American families. Her professional goal is to develop and investigate culturally specific, family-based mental health interventions designed to improve the socioemotional outcomes of African American youth from nonresident father households by promoting stronger coparenting alliances among noncohabiting parents.
Felicia Jamison
Felicia Jamison is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at the University of Maryland College Park. She received her B.A. at Mercer University, her M.A. at Morgan State University, and her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on the lives and experiences of 19th and 20th-centruy African Americans who lived in the rural South. She is currently working on a monograph that analyzes the strategies Southern black women used to accumulate property during slavery and purchase land during the Reconstruction period.
Marcus Johnson
Marcus Johnson earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Politics and Social Policy at Princeton University in the Spring of 2017. Marcus’s research focuses on the intersection of race and ethnicity in Latin American electoral politics. His book manuscript, Racial-ized Democracy: the electoral politics of race in Panama, builds on the insight that politics in racially stratified societies cannot be divorced from projects to construct and undergird systems of racial marginalization and inequality. He aims to use his theoretical and empirical approach to disrupt the running assumption in the Latin American politics literature that race does not matter, particularly in the electoral arena. Beyond his research, Marcus takes teaching seriously and approaches teaching as an opportunity to prepare the next generation of citizens and scholars to critically approach real world politics. Marcus will begin a tenure-track position at City University of New York, Baruch College in the Department of Political Science in the fall of 2018.
Theresa Lopez
Theresa Lopez completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Arizona, where she also studied in the Cognitive Science Program. As an undergraduate, she earned degrees in biology and philosophy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Dr. Lopez works on issues in moral psychology, ethics, and social philosophy. Her primary research focuses on the psychology of moral judgment and moral development, and how scientific findings bear on philosophical questions about prescriptive ethics and moral knowledge. She also has research interests and teaching experience in other areas of ethics, including biomedical ethics.
Kelly Slay
Dr. Kelly Slay is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education and affiliate faculty in the Center for Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education. She received her PhD in Higher Education from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. Kelly’s research explores issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education and is primarily focused in three areas: the implications of campus racial climate for Black students' college enrollment and wellbeing; enrollment management policies aimed at improving campus diversity; and organizational policies and practices that facilitate the success and wellbeing of women and students of color in STEM. Drawing lessons from her professional experiences in public policy and K-16 education, Kelly is passionate about connecting research to practice to help cultivate equitable campus environments that support underrepresented students in undergraduate and graduate education.