Dr. G. Cristina Mora is an associate professor of sociology and the co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses mainly on immigration, categorization, and racial and political attitudes in the United States. Her first book, Making Hispanics, was published by the University of Chicago Press and provides the first historical account of the rise of the “Hispanic/Latino” category in the United States. Mora has received numerous awards for her scholarship from the American Sociological Association, and her research been the subject of various national media segments in venues like the Atlantic, the New Yorker, NPR, and Latino USA. In 2020, she helped to oversee the largest survey on Covid-19 and partisan politics in California and published some of the state’s first briefs and academic articles on the subject. She is currently working on her next book, California Color Lines, which examines inequality and racial and immigration attitudes in California.

In 2021 and 2022, Mora received the UCB Graduate Mentoring Award, the Chancellors Award for Advancing Equity and Inclusion, and led UC Berkeley’s first social-science cluster hire on the issue of “Latinos and Democracy.” She received the nation’s first “Latino Social Science Pipeline” award from the Department of Education, a million dollar grant to advance research opportunities in the area of Latino Social Science, in 2023.