RISEP staff
Dr. Alex Stepick is the Director of RISEP starting June 1, 2009. Dr. Stepick has researched the impact of immigration on Miami for the past 20 years, including work on immigrants in the informal economy. His coauthored book, City on the Edge, on how immigration has changed Miami, won both the Robert Park Award for the best book in Urban Sociology and the Anthony Leeds Award for the best book in Urban Anthropology. A recent work is Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States. The AAA and the Society for Applied Anthropology awarded him the Margaret Mead Award for his research on Haitian refugees. He received the largest grant ever in Cultural Anthropology from the National Science Foundation for a longitudinal project on the academic achievement of minority and immigrant adolescents and their progression into the workforce. He recently served on a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Immigrant Children and Health and on the Cultural Anthropology Panel of the National Science Foundation. Dr. Stepick has testified before the U.S. Congress and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee Affairs and his work has been used by the British House of Commons. Since the founding of RISEP, Dr. Stepick has collaborated on projects involving issues related to immigrant workers.
Carol Dutton Stepick is the Program Coordinator and Field Research Director of RISEP and the Immigration and Ethnicity Institute. For the past 12 years she has coordinated large multi-disciplinary, longitudinal and cross-sectional research projects. This has included directing research assistants, doing qualitative fieldwork and collecting and analyzing quantitative data. She has written and been co-investigator on funded proposals to both private foundations and government agencies. Her primary research focus has been on issues of immigration, ethnicity and inequality. She directed the first representative sample survey of illegal immigrants in the United States. Her graduate degree from Cornell University is in International Development. She worked for 12 years supervising preventive health programs in low income urban and rural communities in Latin American and the Caribbean. Mrs. Stepick is currently on a leave of absence but will return to RISEP in fall 2009.
Emily Eisenhauer has been a research associate with RISEP since she completed her M.A. in Comparative Sociology in 2006. She was lead author of RISEP’s annual State of Working Florida report in 2010 and 2009, as well as the 2007 report Immigrants in Florida: Characteristics and Contributions (2007). She has led research collaborations with local partners such as the Women’s Fund of Miami-Dade, the International Rescue Committee, Power U Center for Social Change, and Our Kids, Inc. of Miami-Dade and Monroe. Ms. Eisenhauer is responsible for the Institute’s communications outreach, and was a field volunteer from 2000 to 2002 with the Peace Corps in China.
Yue Zhang is a research associate who completed her M.A. in Regional Economic and Social Development from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She is responsible for much of the data management at RISEP and has contributed to studies of immigrants, women’s economic security, and wages and cost of living for workers in Florida.
Cynthia S Hernandez is a research associate and currently working on her M.S. in International/Intercultural Education at Florida International University. She is our current lead researcher on Wage Theft and works closely with the Florida Wage Theft Task Force. She is currently leading a database project documenting and exposing the extent of wage theft throughout the state of Florida. Her recent report, entitled Wage Theft in Florida: A Real Problem with Real Solutions, received international and national press coverage. She was also the co-author of Planting Seeds of Justice which won first place in the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology student competition in 2007. Her other research interests are on workplace standards, immigrants and work.
Marcos Feldman is a PhD candidate in Comparative Sociology at Florida International University. He is the author of Subsidizing Entertainment Projects as a Strategy for Urban Economic Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Miami’s American Airlines Arena . His current work is on gentrification and displacement in Miami-Dade, which is the focus of his dissertation research.
RISEP Advisory Committee
Bruce Nissen, Ph.D. is the Chair of the Advisory Committee and previous Director of RISEP. He is a professor of Labor Studies with over 25 years of experience. He has developed, coordinated, and taught in both Labor Studies college credit programs and non-credit labor education programs for union members on numerous topics. He serves on the national executive board of the United Association for Labor Education (UALE) and has published seven scholarly books on labor studies. He is the editor of Labor Studies Journal, where he also edits the “Interactive Issues Forum” section. He has been widely quoted in regional and national media as an expert on labor topics. He has served on boards and commissions of both community organizations and government agencies. Dr. Nissen has provided expert testimony before Congressional committees and various state and local study commissions, and has consulted on public policy for public officials. He authored The Impact of a Living Wage Ordinance on Miami-Dade County, which is widely credited for inspiring movements for a Living Wage Ordinance in other parts of Florida.
This website is dedicated to the memory of Leif Nissen.