Doctoral student Laura Díaz wins social activism prize
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Environmental Health Sciences doctoral candidate Laura Díaz has been awarded a 2025 Thomas I. Yamashita Prize, given annually by the UC Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) to an outstanding emerging social change activist in California.
“The award honors a person whose work transforms the existing social landscape—often in subtle and previously unappreciated ways,” according to the ISSI website. Awardees both help build the capacity of community-based organizations and social movements, alongside enriching academic scholarship by sharing the insights and knowledge produced from community engagement.
Clara Pérez Medina, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography, was also honored with a 2025 award.
Díaz is the co-founder of Partners for Equity and Research at Sonoma State University, where she trains and supports undergraduate researchers engaging in community-driven environmental justice research. She is also the executive director of the Educator Collective for Environmental Justice, where she leads educator professional development in environmental justice curriculum development and partners with youth and community to drive environmental and climate justice action.
She works to empower and support formal and informal educators to imagine and co-create environmental justice curriculum, and she has created environmental justice curricula and lesson plans that are free for educators to use through the Puente Project and Science Friday.
Díaz’s work with youth activists has led to multiple cohorts of students who are now pursuing action within their own communities.
As a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, she studies how biomarkers of mitochondrial dysfunction can shed light on the influence of? exposure to social and environmental stressors on atopic disease among children in frontline environmental justice communities.
“As a daughter of a frontline environmental justice community in the Bay Area, I care to transform our academic institutions into spaces that are truly in service of the community, so that academic tools can be leveraged for the community’s fight for a more just environment,” says Díaz. “I strongly believe that this can be achieved by training and supporting more culturally concordant academic researchers that have shared histories and racial/ethnic identities with the communities that our research is prepared to serve through culturally responsive and community-centered pedagogies, interventions, and data sovereignty. I’m truly grateful to be recognized by ISSI for this award.”
More about Díaz’s research and her views on the relationship between environmental justice communities and academic institutions can be found in this recent publication.