YPEI Welcomes a Cohort of Four Yale Undergraduate Summer Fellows

We are excited to welcome our new cohort of summer fellows! Four Yale Undergraduates have been awarded funding to work with the Yale Prison Education Initiative during our Summer 2019 session.

Diana Saavedra (Trumbull College '20) and Dustin Nguyen (Berkeley College '20) have both been awarded funding through the Dwight Hall Summer Fellows program.

Diana Saavedra is a rising senior at Yale College from Bronx, New York. She is majoring in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration with a concentration in crimmigration—the intersection of criminal law and immigration law. She is working with the Yale Prison Education Initiative as a Dwight Hall Summer Fellow and will continue her work next year as a Dwight Hall Urban Fellow.

Dustin Nguyen is a Yale College senior majoring in Economics and interested in the economics of education. He works on a range of YPEI programming: course facilitation, research, grant-writing, and general day-to-day support for the organization. He is originally from San Diego, California where as a justice-involved youth, he came to realize the importance of fair access to education, the liberal arts, and YPEI's mission.

Mery Concepcion (Pierson College '20) and Joshua Murray (Silliman College '20) have both received funding through the Domestic Summer Award (DSA) through Yale College.

Mery Concepcion is a rising senior at Yale College from Queens, New York. She is an Ethnicity, Race, and Migration major with a focus on racial equity, social justice and reparations. She is deeply committed to YPEI’s mission to expand access to education for incarcerated students and is thrilled to be working with them this summer.

Josh is an undergraduate student at Yale, heading into his fourth and final year. A student of political science, he is working with the Prison Education Initiative as a Summer Intern, a position which he excitedly pursued due to its combination of expanding access to high-quality educative resources and challenging what he views as the excessively punitive nature of the prison system. Outside of the Initiative, he works with Yale Rotaract and with various community groups in New Haven, and makes original music in his spare time.