Martha Morales Hernandez, PhD

Scholar and Educator

About

Martha Morales Hernandez (she/her) earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine in June 2024. She also received her BA and MA in Sociology from UCI. Her research agenda aims to identify ways to better support and promote the educational success and wellbeing of undocumented college students. Her dissertation explores emotional distress and psychological wellbeing among undocumented college students in California and examines the actions students take to resist structural marginalization.

She is a founding member of the Undocumented Student Equity Project (USEP) which is dedicated to conducting research to inform institutional policies and practices that will advance equity and inclusion for undocumented college students. As part of this team, she has co-authored peer-reviewed journal articles, all of which make critical theoretical contributions about the specific ways that immigration status functions as a source of social inequality. The project is also dedicated to identifying ways to better support and promote the educational success and wellbeing of undocumented college students. Additionally, she has worked closely with the UCI Dream Center to use research findings to inform program development, including the creation of a Scholar-in-Residence program and the Dream Project Fellowship, both of which support the professional development of undocumented students on campus. Currently, she is Co-PI on a project that will translate her dissertation research into a toolkit that campuses can use to promote wellbeing among undocumented students.

Martha is a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar in the department of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. In addition, Martha is a former National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellow, Ford Foundation Predoctoral fellow, UCI Eugene Cota Robles fellow, and UCI DREAM center graduate student fellow.

Her research has been supported by the UC Collaborative to Promote Immigrant Student Equity (UC PromISE), UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence, UCI Graduate Division, and the UCI Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP).