Greater Good

The Greater Good Science Center offers annual fellowships to UC Berkeley Undergraduate and Graduate students whose work relates to the Center's mission. The Fellowship program aims to attract scholars from across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines, with a particular focus on the social-behavioral sciences.

Current Graduate Fellows

Sarah Accomazzo
Social Welfare

Sarah Accomazzo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Welfare. After completing a History degree at UC Berkeley, she took several years off to work in helping settings before returning to UC Berkeley for a Master’s in Social Work. As a Hornaday Graduate Fellow, Sarah will be working on her dissertation: developing and administering a scale to measure clinicians’ strengths-based approaches to service provision with clinicians in a public mental health system for youth, and analyzing a secondary, longitudinal data set of youth outcomes from the same system. Sarah enjoys staying connected to macro-level research, practice, and policy through her ongoing work as a research assistant for the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Children’s System of Care.

Daniel Catterson
Psychology

Daniel Catterson is a fifth-year doctoral student of personality and social psychology. He received his BA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008 as a Psychology and Plan II Honors Major. Daniel’s work examines how people’s perceptions of themselves and others can influence (and be influenced by) emotion processes and social status. For his Hornaday Graduate Fellowship, Daniel will begin a longitudinal and multi-method study of the frequency, authenticity, and consequence of pro-social emotion expression on Facebook. When not writing about himself in the third-person, he enjoys cooking and exploring the Bay Area and beyond. He lives in Oakland with his wife and cat

Brett Ford
Psychology

Brett Ford is a fourth-year doctoral student in the social-personality program studying emotion and well-being. She did her undergraduate and masters work in psychology at Boston College and began her doctoral work at the University of Denver. Brett is interested in how emotions and the context in which they are experienced interact to determine psychological health. For her Hornaday Graduate Fellowship, she is conducting a study examining resilience and risk in healthy aging. Specifically, whether people who are more physiologically sensitive to their environment benefit more from experiencing positive social environments yet also suffer more from experiencing negative social environments

Minah Jung
Marketing

Minah is a third year doctoral student in the marketing group at Haas School of Business. Minah studies consumer judgment and decision-making and prosocial behavior. Working with her academic advisor, Leif Nelson, she is currently studying how consumer elective pricing works in markets. As a Hornaday Graduate Fellow, Minah will collaborate with local businesses and non-profit organizations in the Bay Area to investigate how pay-it-forward pricing works. She is interested in studying commercial environments that can strengthen social ties and increase people’s well-being.  Minah enjoys going to concerts, watching cartoons, and hiking in California

Alexandra Main
Psychology

Alexandra Main is a fifth year graduate student in Developmental Psychology. She received her B.A. from Brandeis University in 2008. She currently works under the supervision of Professors Qing Zhou and Joseph Campos studying empathy, emotion regulation, and cultural influences on children’s development. Her current research examines the role of cultural orientations among Chinese American children from immigrant families in the development of empathy and prosocial responding. She is also conducting research on the role of empathy in parent-adolescent conflict resolution.

Michaela Simpson
Psychology

Michaela Simpson is a second-year graduate student in the clinical science psychology program. She received her BA from Stanford University, where she majored in international relations. Formerly an observer of the behavior of nations, Michaela now focuses on the behavior of humans. Her current interests include studying sensory processing and hedonic judgment and their relation to behavior, brain, and culture. As a Hornaday Graduate Fellow, she intends to pursue her interest in the biological bases of kind, helpful—or “pro-social” behavior—looking specifically at the biological response to distress as a way to understand pro-social behavior. An avid dancer, pianist, and traveler, Michaela revels in the realms of exploration and discovery.

Trinh Tran
Sociology

Trinh Tran is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of sociology.  Her dissertation explores whether and how neighborhoods shape the quality and pattern of student friendships and interactions with teachers.  By comparing the social lives of students who attend magnet vs. neighborhood high schools, she seeks to understand the extent to which students are able to form ties with other students and with teachers outside of their neighborhood boundaries.  Trinh has worked as a school reform facilitator in various Bay Area elementary public schools.  She received her BA from the University of Chicago and her MA in sociology from Berkeley.

Current Undergraduate Fellows

Lameese Eldesouky
Psychology

Lameese Eldesouky is a fourth year undergraduate majoring in Psychology and minoring in Philosophy. She is currently a research assistant in Professor Oliver John’s Berkeley Personality Laboratory where she investigates individual differences and emotion regulation strategies such as expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal. Her Goldberg Fellow project, “The Intrapersonal and Social Benefits of Increasing Emotional Awareness”, seeks to understand how emotional awareness plays a role in suppression use and how increasing awareness may decrease suppression use. Her ultimate goal is not only to determine the causal link between awareness and suppression, but also inspire targeted interventions for people who chronically suppress their emotions.

Past Fellows

• Past Postdoctoral Fellows
• Past Graduate Fellows
• Past Undergraduate Fellows