About
Giovanni Román-Torres is a PhD candidate in Sociology and predoctoral trainee at the Population Studies Center within the Institute for Social Research. His research engages broadly with social mobility, racial/ethnic stratification, immigration, and spatial inequality, with a particular interest in Latina/os in the United States. His primary research projects employ mixed-methods to study how immigrant destinations for recently arrived Latina/os across the United States have changed over time, how contexts in new destinations shape the assimilatory trajectories of Latina/o immigrants, and how Latina/o immigrants establish a sense of belonging in geographies that are historically Black and White (e.g., the U.S. South). Other research that he is currently engaged in investigates the effects of mobility on individual outcomes, racial/ethnic gaps in college completion and the role of citizenship status, and examining historical naturalization rates of immigrants in the United States.
Before joining UM Sociology, Giovanni worked at a community college in East Los Angeles, California where he was a program coordinator for an academic program that is geared towards increasing college retention and transfer rates to four-year universities. He is a proud first-gen, community college transfer student from East Los Angeles College and received his B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. His undergraduate thesis examined the effect of student-professor interactions on first generation Mexican-American community college students’ pursuit to transfer to the four-year university.
