Center Graduate Fellowships enable graduate students to participate in collaborative research projects with community-based organizations, social service agencies, health care providers, businesses, and government in Chicago's city and suburbs. Through their research and teaching projects, fellows are active participants in Loyola University Chicago's efforts to improve the quality of life for all members of the Chicago metropolitan community.

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The Graduate Fellows are selected from a pool of applicants and matched to team projectsbased on skills and interest. The Fellows serve in a facilitation role for the projects and act as the link between Loyola faculty and undergraduates and community researchers to keep projects on track. Fellows are supported in part by funds from McCormick Tribune Foundation and individual projects.

CURRENT GRADUATE FELLOWS

Name
Eddie Brown	Eddie is a second year MSW student at Loyola University Chicago. He has articles published on bipolar disorder and PTSD. Eddie has been working with CURL since the fall of 2010. He is involved with various projects at CURL, but has been primarily working on the “Evaluation of Chicago’s Plan to End Homelessness.”
Julie Shevrin	Julie is currently a graduate student in Social Work at Loyola University Chicago. She is interested in how structural inequality affects rates of mental illness in communities. Currently, she is working on the “Evaluation of Chicago’s Plan to End Homelessness” project at CURL. Julie is specifically looking at the experience of homeless youth in the Chicago homeless system.
Kimberlee Guenther	Kimberlee is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. Her primary interests are housing, public space, and collaborative research with community partners. Her work at CURL focuses on factors that produce stable racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, as well as the experiences of tenant organizers that have worked to preserve affordable housing in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood.
Reiko Kakuyama	Reiko graduated in Loyola’s Cultural and Educational Policy Studies, and she is currently in her first year of M.Ed. in Research Methodology. With a focus on immigrant and refugee communities, her research interests involve educational experiences and the reshaping of educational values in the U.S. resettlement process. Currently, Reiko is working on a three-year evaluation project with the Changing Worlds’ Literacy and Cultural Connections Program. She is excited to be part of the effort that seeks to strengthen the partnership between CPS and ethnically-diverse communities through the culturally-grounded literacy curriculum.
Mary Kleinman	Mary is a doctoral student in Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. She has an extensive background in women’s health; including, developing women’s health curricula for medical education, creating a multidisciplinary graduate concentration in women’s health, and training physicians about various women’s health issues. Mary is also working with the American Medical Women’s Association to create a digital resource library of women’s health curricular materials for medical education. Her research interests include women veterans’ health, medical education, and institutional change. At CURL, she is working on the “Evaluation of Chicago’s Plan to End Homelessness.”
Teresa Neumann	Teresa is in the process of completing her master’s degree in Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. Having had previous experience as a community organizer, she is interested in community-based research approaches that focus on urban issues. Specifically, Teresa is interested in education and health care issues. At CURL, she is involved with collecting data for the project, “Finding Racially and Ethnically Diverse Neighborhoods: Exploring America’s Future.” Furthermore, she is also helping to systematize the research and evaluation publications library within the CURL website.
Xinyi Zhang	Xinyi is pursuing her graduate degree in accounting at Loyola University Chicago. She has a diverse set of accounting experience from various sectors: including a non-for-profit agency, food industry, international software company, and an accounting firm. At CURL, she works on a variety of tasks including: producing yearly projections, monthly financial statements and reports for salaries, researching project accounts, monitoring and reconciling expenditure and salaries of grants as well as endowment and research project accounts, reviewing account balances and account statuses, managing research project account folders and related documents, and creating specialized budget reports based on the needs of CURL.