Announcing Our Spring 2026 Undergraduate Research Fellows

Each year, the Berkeley Center for New Media pairs undergraduates with a graduate student mentor, offering them the chance to complete real, graduate level research while at Cal. We are thrilled to announce this past semester's Fellows.

Rebekah Murphy

State of Mind(Mine): A State Secessionist Database

Rebekah is a student majoring in Geography. Growing up in a town shaped by a rural-suburban divide, she first started paying close attention to fringe political movements around the 2020 demonstrations, following independent journalism into the alt-right rallies and conspiracy communities that emerged in their wake. That interest sharpened into a broader concern with the United States' political fractures and the growing gap in what Americans agree constitutes fact. She has led and worked across a range of school clubs and city councils, and is excited to bring that collaborative experience into a formal research setting.

Rebekah will work with Alexis Wood on completing and publishing State of Mind, State of Mine (SoMSoM), a qualitative database documenting state secessionist movements across the United States. The project, developed over four years with the Leventhal Map Library, will become a public-facing digital archive and interactive map. Rebekah will help distill and synthesize the archival research, edit movement profiles for publication, and support the translation of qualitative data into accessible digital formats.

Junghyuk Han

Intentional Scroll: Rethinking Short-Video Design for Older Adults

Junghyuk is a visiting student double majoring in Global Culture Technology and Immersive Media. Their coursework in UI/UX programming introduced them to quantitative evaluation methods and to C++ and Python, and at Berkeley they have been co-designing an AR civic app addressing eviction and displacement in the Bay Area while learning fabrication tools through Jacobs Makerspace. A published article on digital activity as a form of data labor helped Junghyuk articulate a longer-standing question: how platform architectures shape collective behavior, and what alternatives might support user agency instead of extracting attention. Outside the classroom, Junghyuk has organized public forums and conducted oral interviews on democratic participation as a member of the Youth and University Student Council of the Basic Income Party in Seoul.

Junghyuk will work with Connie Gu to understand and address compulsive short-video use among older adults. The project pairs a design prototype meant to increase intention around swiping behavior with a community-based, participatory co-design study centering older adults' lived experiences. Junghyuk will contribute to literature review, data analysis, and the collaborative design process behind both strands of the work.

Sydney Fisher

Carceral California: A 3D Archive of Pasts, Presents, and Alternative Futures

Sydney is a third-year student majoring in Architecture with experience in municipal planning. Her work as a Planning Intern with the Town of Moraga exposed her to zoning, housing policy, and land use decision-making, and her coursework at Berkeley has built her proficiency in Rhinoceros 3D, SketchUp, V-Ray, and Adobe Creative Suite. She is drawn to architecture not only as a design discipline but as a tool for analyzing and representing societal systems, and is especially interested in methodologies like those used by Forensic Architecture, which combine spatial reconstruction with social inquiry.

Sydney will work with Tamara Jamil on a 3D living archive documenting rural jail construction across California. Using Forensic Architecture's "Situated Testimony" method, the project reconstructs research sites in Rhino across past and present states to accompany filmed interviews with community members. Sydney will help build these 3D environments, assist with site visits and documentation, and support the situated testimony interview process.

These students will be presenting at the Undergraduate Research Symposium in Fall 2026 — stay tuned for more information.