Rina Nagashima is a predoctoral research fellow for Professor Jesse Rothstein who is the Faculty Director of the California Policy Lab’s UC Berkeley site. In her role, she primarily supports Professor Rothstein’s research on education, the social safety net, and labor economics. Born in Japan and raised in Hawaii, her upbringing as a first-generation immigrant in a multicultural environment drove her to a career focused on producing high-quality, data-driven research to advance the public good.

During her undergraduate studies, Rina worked in a number of research roles. Most recently, she was a research assistant at Claremont Graduate University where she provided data cleaning and analysis support for a paper on geographic disparities in crime response. She also interned at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Economic Security and Opportunity and the Public Policy Institute of California’s Higher Education Center.

In her individual research, she enjoys spatial analysis work. For her senior thesis, she designed a spatial simulation adopted from the political gerrymandering literature and litigation to evaluate the effects of school attendance boundaries on racial segregation, controlling for housing segregation and inter-district segregation. Because her thesis was focused on developing the methods to provide a proof of concept on six school districts, she hopes to revisit this project in the future to scale up to a larger sample of school districts in the US.

Rina holds a BA in public policy and mathematics from Scripps College in Claremont, California. In her free time, she enjoys aerial and circus arts, rock climbing, and surfing.