Two from Brown School named fellows by WashU’s Center for Race, Ethnicity & Equity

A faculty member and a doctoral student from the Brown School have been awarded fellowships by WashU’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE²).

Mitra Naseh, an assistant professor, has been named a Spring 2026 CRE² Faculty Fellow. The fellowship provides a semester free from teaching and service obligations, allowing faculty to fully dedicate their time to research. Faculty Fellows engage in and lead collaborative workshops and seminars, and each is invited to present their own research and scholarship in a dedicated session.

Naseh’s research focuses on the social and economic integration of minoritized and racialized groups with a migration background, with a particular focus on migration policies as social determinants of health. Her research is rooted in and guided by her previous professional work experience with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

Jihye Lee, a PhD student in social work, has been selected as a 2025-2026 Race & Ethnicity Scholar Fellow. This fellowship is awarded annually to three graduate students whose work advances scholarship in race, ethnicity, and equity. Fellows participate in events, workshops, and professional development opportunities, and are encouraged to share their research or creative work with their cohort and center affiliates.

“I’m deeply honored to be selected for this incredible opportunity,” Lee said. “This fellowship will help deepen my understanding of how structural barriers affect refugee communities and support my research to inform more equitable policy solutions.”

Lee’s research focuses on how restricted migration policies shape the economic integration of forced and unauthorized migrant populations. She employs a multidimensional poverty framework and applies AI-driven methods to examine how legal status, migration policies, and racialized exclusion shape economic integration outcomes. Her work is inspired by her experiences as both a researcher and social worker, where she witnessed how exclusionary migration policies fail to account for the broader dimensions of refugees’ integration into host communities.