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Contact: Jon Meerdink ([email protected])

ANN ARBOR — Ph.D. candidate Giovanni Román-Torres acknowledges that his path to academia is somewhat non-traditional. The first in his family to graduate from high school, Román-Torres took several years off before attending community college and then ultimately ending up at the University of Michigan.

But his time between high school and college proved beneficial, even shaping his perspective toward what would become a significant part of his current research interests.

“I come from a family of Mexican immigrants,” he said. “So when I returned to college, I think I had a new perspective on why people with similar backgrounds to me end up taking different pathways that they take to complete high school, graduate from college, or even go on to pursue a Ph.D.”

Román-Torres is pursuing that Ph.D. now, but began his journey at the U-M in the sociology department, where academic advisor Fabian Pfeffer sponsored him as a trainee of the Institute for Social Research’s Population Studies Center (PSC). Pfeffer, who was the director of ISR’s Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics from 2020-23, sparked Román-Torres’ interest in educational mobility, helping his understanding of current literature in the field in addition to research methodology. It’s a research focus that persists to this day, as Román-Torres continues to broadly investigate social mobility related to education and immigrants in the United States.

“That’s what initially drew me to the area of thinking about mobility in the sense of inequalities in education over generations, not only for Latino students but any other kind of ethno-racial group, and how that affects their mobility,” Román-Torres said, “Fabian is well-know for doing that kind of work, and I really wanted to learn from him.”

Pfeffer and others at ISR helped Román-Torres establish his educational foundation, while also introducing him to different facets of the Next Generation Initiative, which helped him fund key research projects throughout his time with ISR. As his research interests grew over time, Román-Torres was able to utilize funds from the Next Generation Initiative to support his work. 

As he explores how Latino immigrants establish a sense of belonging in southern cities in the United States, Román-Torres has relied in part on Next Generation Initiative funding to complete field work. 

“I live in Tennessee and I’ve been doing field work here for the past three years. The funds have been useful in helping me travel across the state to different cities in Tennessee, paying for gas, really just getting to and from different interviews with participants. I also used it for recording devices that have been really useful for the interviews, being able to record them just so I could transcribe them later.”

Román-Torres plans to defend his dissertation in the spring of 2025 after entering the job market the fall of 2024. When he continues his research, he plans to focus on broadening the academic understanding of how Latino immigrants integrate into American society.

“My main research area is Latino experiences across the U.S., and I’d like to focus on places other than those that have historically gotten a lot of attention. I really would like to make a larger contribution to the understanding of how Latinos live their lives and get accustomed to living in the U.S., especially immigrants, anywhere from major metropolitan areas such as Nashville, Tennessee to small rural towns in Idaho.”

Bolstered by connections at ISR, he figures to be in a good position to do just that.

Not just Fabian, but having other people at ISR who made me aware of the possibilities and resources,” he said. “That’s been extremely helpful for how I think about my dissertation. It’s not just the financial awards, but the vast amount of resources and access to different databases that has been really useful to me.”