Laura Enriquez (pictured left) and Erin Lockwood (pictured right) have been named 2021 recipients of research awards from the School of Social Sciences. Funded by the Dean's Leadership Society, a network of supporters and friends of the School of Social Sciences committed to the school’s success, each honor carries a $5,000 prize.

Enriquez, Chicano/Latino studies, is this year’s recipient of the Social Sciences Associate Professor Research Award. The award was established in 2011-12 to recognize research excellence and project proposals by newly tenured faculty in social sciences.  

Enriquez’s work illuminates how undocumented immigration status shapes the opportunities and relationships of young adults – a topic she explores in depth in her book, Of Love and Papers: How Immigration Policy Affects Romance and Family. With funding from the School of Social Sciences, she’ll be expanding her UC Collaborative to Promote Immigrant and Student Equity (UC PromISE) project, an 18-campus University of California and California State University system-wide study on the extent to which undocumented status disrupts students’ education and wellbeing. The award will support in-depth interviews with select student participants who identify as high or low resource users at their respective campuses. Findings will shed light on how individual student actions, campus resources, and institutional context may help reduce inequalities. Enriquez joined the UCI campus in 2014 as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Scholar in sociology. In 2015, she was appointed as a tenure-track assistant professor in Chicano/Latino studies. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA.

Lockwood, a political scientist, is the Social Sciences Assistant Professor Research Award recipient. Established in 2005, the honor recognizes research excellence accompanied by a strong project proposal from a junior faculty member in social sciences.

Lockwood studies the impact financial derivatives have within the global political economy. She’s studied the role this $600 trillion market played in the 2007-09 financial crisis, and she’s interested in how it got so big with so little public oversight, given its importance in – and associated risk for – the global political economy. With funding from the school, she’ll assess how governmental policies and practices structuring international lending institutions shape global distributions of wealth and income. Her findings will provide a detailed analysis of how economic inequality is being discussed at the international level and how these discussions are shaping policies. Lockwood joined the UCI School of Social Sciences in 2017 after completing her Ph.D. at Northwestern University.