Bernadette Blashill

Bernadette Blashill is a doctoral student in Sociology at Harvard University. Her research investigates how people care for others in professional and personal contexts. One of her projects examines how people in helping professions navigate the challenges that come with providing services. Specifically, it seeks to understand how immigration attorneys who work on humanitarian-based cases (e.g., asylum) manage moral distress, burnout, and secondary trauma. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University, and the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. Her other project, in collaboration with researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, focuses on how to support adult-child caregivers of their parents with cancer. 
Prior to pursuing graduate school, she worked in immigration and disability law in the Bay Area for three years, and after as a Policy and Research Analyst in educational equity for Catalyst California. She also contributed to two UC Berkeley studies investigating economic precarity, race, and the social impact of COVID-19 in California.

She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2019 with a B.A. in Sociology with high honors. In her free time, she loves swing dancing, playing the flute, and spending time with her loved ones.