Meet our 2025-2026 Cohort!

Ashley Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), specializing in human learning and memory. Her dissertation aims to uncover the motivational and attentional mechanisms that support learning across the lifespan, employing an interdisciplinary approach that integrates perspectives from cognitive science, education, and gerontology. Ashley’s research is complemented by her efforts to strengthen scholarly communities and promote diversity in academia. Notably, she is the President of Psychology in Action, a graduate-student organization dedicated to increasing public engagement with psychological research through science communication (e.g., blogging, writing retreats, Exploring Your Universe science fair). Ashley has also assumed various positions that enabled her to guide departmental decision-making and student advocacy efforts. For example, she served as Vice President of the Psychology Graduate Student Association, mobilizing support for graduate students’ needs through faculty briefings and professional development initiatives. Concurrently, Ashley seeks to expand undergraduate representation in research as the Graduate Student Coordinator of the annual UCLA Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference, a role she has held for four years, creating an intellectual environment where undergraduate students can showcase their projects and forge meaningful connections with peers and faculty. Alongside the aforementioned activities, she is dedicated to teaching and mentoring, having taught multiple upper-division courses in cognitive and educational psychology. Overall, Ashley strives to empower the next generation of scientists through continued service and research while advancing equity and inclusion in her community.

Elayne Stecher is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is also completing an M.S. in Statistics and Data Science. Her research examines how exposure to violence shapes political attitudes, cognition, and support for coercive state policies in conflict-affected settings. Using experiments, large-scale survey data and unexpected events during survey design (UESD), she studies how individuals interpret political violence and how these experiences influence political behavior. Her work combines rigorous quantitative methods with collaborative field research across multiple countries.

Elizabeth A. Yonko (she/they) is a candidate for the PhD in Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her research focuses on HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention, LGBTQ+ health, and the psychosocial and structural factors that shape health outcomes. Originally trained as a biomedical engineer at Duke University and later earning a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from Columbia University, Elizabeth brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to her research, integrating quantitative and qualitative methods and centering community-based participatory research principles to drive social change and policy reform. Her dissertation examines how policy and structural factors influence HIV risk, mental health, and substance use among LGBTQ+ populations. She has recently led several mixed-methods studies examining emerging issues in LGBTQ+ health, including implementation preferences for doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis (DoxyPEP), experiences with mpox vaccination during the 2022 outbreak, and the disruptions to HIV care following the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. Her scholarship has resulted in more than 15 peer-reviewed manuscripts published or under review, including several first-author publications in leading public health journals. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Elizabeth is deeply committed to mentorship, teaching, and community engagement. Through the UCLA Center for LGBTQ+ Advocacy, Research and Health, she mentors high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, and contributes to community programming focused on sexual health, HIV prevention, and harm reduction. Elizabeth ultimately aims to become a professor of epidemiology, leading an independent research program that develops and applies rigorous and community-centered methodological approaches to address HIV and LGBTQ+ health inequities, while fostering greater representation in academia.

Jose Nateras (he/him) is a PhD candidate at UCLA in Theater & Performance Studies. His research concerns the performance of horror in relation to marginalized identities. Jose has his BA in Theatre from Loyola University Chicago and his MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Alongside experience teaching (SAIC, Truman College) and both writing for and acting on stage and screen (SAG-AFTRA, AEA, WGA), he is a published novelist. Jose’s work applies an interdisciplinary, transmedia approach to horror as a method for Queer and BIPOC survival as with his current research on vampiric counterperformance.

Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she specializes in colonial Latin America, with particular emphasis on gender, sexuality, and legal culture in early modern Spanish America. Her research examines women and bigamy in colonial Mexico from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, exploring how women navigated marriage, migration, and ecclesiastical authority within the overlapping legal frameworks of the Spanish Inquisition and the Catholic Church. Through close analysis of inquisitorial records and archival sources from Mexico and Spain, her work investigates how race, religion, and social status shaped women’s experiences of marital transgression and legal prosecution in the early modern Spanish American world.

Martínez-Tibbles holds an M.A. in History from UCLA and a B.A. in History and French from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she graduated summa cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship for archival research in Mexico City and Seville. She has presented her work at conferences such as the American Historical Association and the Western Association of Women Historians and has published on colonial Mexican women in bigamy cases.

Past Events

• Yale Bouchet Conference on Diversity and Graduate Education
  April 5-6, 2019
• Yale Bouchet Conference on Diversity and Graduate Education 2017
  April 7-8, 2017
• UCLA Bouchet Welcome Luncheon 2017 (Photos)
  March 10, 2017
• Bouchet Honor Society Fall Forum at Howard University
  September 15-16, 2016
• Yale Bouchet Conference on Diversity and Graduate Education 2016
  April 1-2, 2016
• UCLA Bouchet Welcome Luncheon 2016 (Photos)
  March 18, 2016
• Yale Bouchet Conference on Diversity and Graduate Education 2015
  April 10-11, 2015

Our Alumni

Alumni Cohorts 

Contact Us!

Graduate Education Portal