Meet Our New Fellows Reporting on Latino Well-Being

October 12, 2021

The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and the university’s Graduate School of Journalism are pleased to announce the two recipients of their inaugural Reporting Fellowship on Latino Well-Being, Kathryn Styer Martínez and Mathew Miranda. Both fellows are students at Berkeley’s journalism school, which is co-sponsoring this fellowship with the GGSC.

The fellowship will support a series of articles exploring the well-being of Latino families and communities, with a particular focus on findings from the social and behavioral sciences. In recent years, there has been a rich and growing body of research suggesting a “happiness paradox”: While greater wealth is often associated with greater happiness, members of the Latino community in the United States and citizens of Latin American countries are happier than would be predicted by their wealth alone, suggesting that there are other important factors to their psychological well-being. Both fellows will explore this and related research, ultimately reporting on the sources of social and emotional well-being among Latino families and communities, threats and challenges to their well-being, strategies for protecting against these threats, and lessons from this research that have implications for other groups and communities across the U.S.

The fellows will work closely with the GGSC’s staff and faculty, including the editors of its award-winning online magazine, Greater Good. They will supplement what they learn from the research with their own reporting and write a series of articles for Greater Good through the summer of 2022.

Please read on for more details about our newest fellows, and visit our fellowships page for more details about the program and summaries of past graduate and undergraduate fellows’ work.

Kathryn Styer Martínez
Journalism

Kathryn Styer Martínez is a Northern Californian multimedia journalist, now in her first year at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her reporting focuses on Latino communities, economic equity, and solutions to social problems. She was the 2020-2021 Toni Randolph Reporting fellow at Minnesota Public Radio News, the 2019-2020 New Economy Reporting Project fellow, and the former director of KGCP-LPFM, Peralta Community Radio, in Oakland, California.
She is a freelance photojournalist, reporter, and broadcast journalist. Her work has appeared in El Tecolote, The Oaklandside, MPR News, National Public Radio, Outside Online, Talk Poverty, New Life Quarterly, and Making Contact.

 

Mathew Miranda
Journalism

Mathew Miranda is a second-year graduate student at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism. He is currently a reporting assistant for the Investigative Reporting Program and part-time reporter for Richmond Pulse, a community media outlet. He also serves as a student editor for the California Reporting Project, a coalition of over 40 newsrooms dedicated to creating the first statewide database on police misconduct. As a GGSC fellow, Mathew will report on research exploring the sources of social and emotional well-being among Latinos communities. Through this work, he aims to examine the threats and challenges to Latino well-being while also focusing on the strategies to protect against these threats.