Yanira Rivas Pineda is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is currently finishing her dissertation titled “Crime-Ridden and Heavily Policed: Political Involvement in two Los Angeles Public Housing Facilities.” Her research explores political participation in under-resourced, crime-ridden, and over-policed Latino communities. What does political participation look like in these communities? How do these communities mobilize, and what mobilizes them? How does contact with crime and the criminal justice system shape political participation? Yanira employs a mixed-method research approach using quantitative and qualitative tools for data collection and analysis to explore these questions. Yanira is the recipient of numerous research awards, including the UCSB Chicano Studies Institute Research Grant, UCSB Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grant, UCSB Department of Political Science Graduate Research and Training Grant, and the APSA Fund for Latino Scholarship Grant. She has been a Graduate Division Dissertation Fellow, Graduate Opportunity Fellow, SAGE Fellow, and a Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Fellow. She intends to use the 2022 Latino Scholarship Grant to attend the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada. Yanira’s areas of specialization are Latino politics, race and ethnic politics, American politics, criminal justice, comparative politics, and Central American politics (in the U.S. and comparatively).