Suleyma Vergara-Tapia

Suleyma Vergara-Tapia is a first-year Ph.D. student in sociology at the Graduate Center. She is interested in studying deep and extreme poverty, social policies, and income inequality as it relates to women, children, and immigrants. Vergara-Tapia graduated from the University of California, Riverside, with a double major in political science and economics. She received her master’s in public policy with a concentration in Inequality and Poverty. Before joining the Graduate Center, she worked as a lecturer and teaching assistant at UC Riverside, teaching courses in public policy, and as a research assistant at the Center for Business and Policy Research (CBPR) at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. While at the CBPR, she coordinated with the California Department of Transportation to carry out community outreach meetings, develop surveys, and assist in the preparation of statewide reports on the transportation needs of ten of California’s rural counties.