Berkeley Law has selected four extraordinary incoming law students as Human Rights Center Law Scholars for 2023-2026! We look forward to working with these scholars, and invite them to use the Human Rights Center as their homebase on the Berkeley campus.
Katie Chin is a student at UC Berkeley School of Law. She graduated from Macalester College in 2022 with a degree in history and Spanish. During college, she spent a year interning at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, working primarily on DACA and naturalization cases. She was also involved with Stop Line 3, an indigenous-led environmental activism movement to halt construction of a tar sands pipeline through treaty-protected land in Northern Minnesota. After graduation, she received a Fulbright grant to spend a year conducting research in Trinidad and Tobago surveying refugees’ access to healthcare, education, and legal services. Katie is interested in the intersection between colonialism and international human rights and eager to continue her work in this field alongside the HRC.
Amelia Dal Pra, a first-year law student at UC Berkeley School of Law, is deeply committed to legal and policy solutions at the nexus of climate change, displacement, and labor rights. Before law school, she interned for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Malaysia, worked on Capitol Hill, and led numerous policy and advocacy campaigns as a Refugee Advocacy Officer at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS). In 2021, she co-authored two peer-reviewed articles with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), focusing on mitigating the impacts of climate disasters and facilitating environmental migration through humanitarian and labor migration pathways. Amelia holds a B.A. in international studies and political science from Pepperdine University, an M.A. from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and a Certificate in Refugees, Migration, and Humanitarian Emergencies from Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM).
Chau Le and her family immigrated to the United States from Vietnam in the early 2000s, settling down in San Jose, Cal. She graduated with Honors from Georgetown University in 2021 and completed an MA in social sciences at UChicago in 2023. For the 2022–23 academic year, she served as a Boren Fellow in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, studying political communications. Before arriving at Berkeley Law, she served as a research assistant for an archival project centered on the cultural history of Washington, DC’s U Street neighborhood. She was also a copy editor of book manuscripts and a French-language proofreader for a micro-history set in colonial Saint-Domingue, among other roles. Most recently, she interned with Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, supporting the organization’s affordable housing and historical preservation efforts in the Southside’s Pullman region. In addition to her interest in the international side of human rights, Chau is passionate about transmitting those values in her work with Bay Area causes and locals. Her human rights interests center on immigration and criminal justice reform, with a particular focus on direct legal services. At Berkeley Law, she assists asylum seekers prepare their applications through the California Asylum Representation Clinic. She also conducts legal research to support various states’ Clean Slate campaigns as a member of the Paper Prisons Initiative (PPI) Research Group. Chau is committed to the framework of law as an instrument of social justice and she is thrilled to be pursuing this work as a 2023–26 HRC Scholar.
Kaylana Mueller-Hsia is a student at UC Berkeley School of Law interested in the relationships between technology, migration, and power. Before starting law school she worked in Jakarta, Indonesia on a Fulbright research scholarship, where she studied the use of digital evidence in investigations conducted by the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights. Prior to that, she researched government surveillance and discrimination at the Brennan Center for Justice, and served as a Technology Policy Advisor in the San Jose Mayor’s Office on a Haas Fellowship. She graduated with a B.A. in International Relations with honors in International Security Studies from Stanford University in 2019. She’s excited to be at Berkeley to learn more about using the law in support of social movements.