Meet the Co-Directors

Nathan Chan, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations

Nathan Chan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University. He specializes in American Politics and Research Methods. He has published or has forthcoming journal articles in Perspectives on Politics, Political Behavior, and Political Research Quarterly among others and has featured his research in the Washington Post and the Brookings Institute. He teaches courses in race, ethnicity, and politics; political behavior; and empirical approaches in political science. He completed his undergraduate at UCLA and received his Ph.D. in political science at UC Irvine. Nathan is from Eagle Rock, a neighborhood in Northeast LA. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling, hiking, and concerts & live music.

Chaya Crowder, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations

Chaya Crowder is an Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. She received her PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University where she also received certificates in African-American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Chaya’s research and teaching interests include political behavior, race and ethnicity politics, social media and American politics as well as gender and American politics. She uses an intersectional approach in her research to explore the ways that attention to race, gender and sexuality have differential effects on political behavior.

Claudia Sandoval, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations

A headshot of Claudia Sandoval against a burnt orange background

Professor Claudia Sandoval earned her B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago with concentrations in American politics and race and politics. Her dissertation, “Conjuring Immigrant Racial Threat Narratives: Using Citizenship Status to Shape Black-Latino Relations in US Politics,” examines the plight of Blacks and Latinos for inclusion in the U.S. and analyzes how the contentious discourse around citizenship – particularly the anti-immigration narrative – has been used to strategically divide these two groups. During the 2014-2015 school year, Dr. Sandoval was a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where she taught “Latino Politics.”

Fernando J. Guerra, Professor of Political Science and International Relations and Chicana/o Latina/o Studies and Director of the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles

Fernando Guerra

Fernando J. Guerra, professor of political science and chicana/o latina/o studies, is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at LMU. His area of scholarly work is in local governance, urban politics, and racial and ethnic politics. Dr. Guerra has been a principal investigator in over 20 major studies on Los Angeles, leadership studies and electoral politics. He is also the principal investigator for the largest general social survey in the Los Angeles region.

Michael A. Genovese, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, President of Global Policy Institute at LMU, Loyola Chair of Leadership Studies, Director of Institute for Leadership Studies

Michael A. Genovese received a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1979. He holds the Loyola Chair of Leadership Studies, and is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Institute for Leadership Studies, and President of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University. In 2006, he was made a Fellow at the Queens College, Oxford University. And in 2017 Professor Genovese was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award, only the fifth time in the APSA’s history that this award has been given out.