Luz Marina Arias was a graduate student in the Department of Economics at Stanford University before coming to CDDRL. She was born and raised in Mexico City and completed her undergraduate studies in Economics in Mexico, at ITAM. Her research interests lie at the intersection of economics, political science, and history. She is interested in the impact on economic and political development of institutions that organize and coordinate economic and political behavior. Her current project focuses on one such central institution, the state, and studies the factors that lead to the emergence of the state as an entity centralizing coercive power. She studies Latin American history and in particular the experience of colonial Mexico in the transition to such a form of state.

Greg Domber received his A.B in History and Philosophy from Lafayette College in 1997 and recently completed his Ph.D. in History at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. His dissertation, "Supporting the Revolution: America, Democracy, and the End of the Cold War in Poland, 1981-1989,"utilized a multi-archival, international history research approach combined with numerous oral history interviews to take a sober accounting of American and Western influences on Poland's democratic transformation from the declaration of martial law in December 1981 through the creation of the Mazowiecki government in August 1989.

At CDDRL, Greg continued his research on international influences on Poland's transformation during the 1980s, focusing further work on the role played by non-governmental actors, particularly labor unions, émigré groups, humanitarian organizations, and American business interests.

Feng Luo is a visiting pre-doctoral fellow from Peking University, pursuing his study in the United States on a scholarship awarded by the China Scholarship Council of the Ministry of Education. Feng entered the doctoral program at Peking University in the Fall of 2006. His dissertation will focus on US democracy promotion policy. Before this, Luo Feng conducted research as Research Assistant at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and he took participation in several research programs and issued some papers in the field of international relations. Luo Feng earned his BA degree at Henan University and his MA degree at Peking University.

Olena Nikolayenko is a recepient of the 2007-2009 post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research interests include comparative democratization, public opinion, social movements, youth, and corruption. In her dissertation, she analyzed political support among the first post-Soviet generation grown up without any direct experience with communism in Russia and Ukraine. She has a PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada.

At CDDRL, she examined why some youth movements are more successful than others in applying methods of nonviolent resistance to mobilize the population in non-democratic regimes. She has recently conducted fieldwork in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Serbia, and Ukraine.

Selected Publications

• 2008. "Contextual Effects on Historical Memory: Soviet Nostalgia among Post-Soviet Adolescents." Communist and Post-Communist Studies 41(2): 243-259
• 2008. "Life-Cycle, Generational and Period Effects on Protest Potential in Yeltsin's Russia." Canadian Journal of Political Science 41(2): 437-460
• 2007. "The Revolt of the Post-Soviet Generation: Youth Movements in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine." Comparative Politics 39(2): 169-188
•  2007. "Web Cartoons in a Closed Society: Animal Farm as an Allegory of Belarus." PS: Political Science and Politics 40(2): 307-310
• 2004. "Press Freedom during the 1994 and 1999 Presidential Elections in Ukraine: A Reverse Wave?" Europe-Asia Studies 56(5): 661-686