About

Cristina Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University, with additional appointments in Applied Physics. She holds a Ph.D. from The University of New Mexico and a B.S. from Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela. Her research focuses on developing and applying novel optical imaging technologies for studying the structure and function of living systems at depth and with high resolution. Through a multidisciplinary approach involving physics, nonlinear optics, and advanced optical imaging modalities, Dr. Rodríguez pushes the limits of in vivo deep tissue imaging and advances understanding of previously underexplored biology. Her lab investigates how tactile information is processed and relayed in the mouse spinal cord, and how the coding scheme changes under pathological conditions, utilizing techniques such as three-photon microscopy and adaptive optics. The lab also develops novel imaging probes for applications including deep tissue vasculature imaging, cell tracking, light-activated therapeutic delivery systems, and optogenetic manipulation of neural circuits. Dr. Rodríguez's work contributes significantly to the fields of optical imaging and neurobiology, and she is recognized with awards such as the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award and the Beckman Young Investigator Award.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Law and economics
• Public administration

Selected publications

• The President and Immigration Law

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 26 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  The President and Immigration Law reveals how the President has become our immigration policy-maker-in-chief. By deciding how to enforce the law, administrations shape the polity, sometimes clashing with Congress. Rather than lament this dynamic as distorting the Constitution, the authors demonstrate how it can advance the law's legitimacy and outline political principles and institutional devices to curb potential abuses

  DOI

• Into the Deep: Shaping Light to Unravel Biology

  2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Multiphoton microscopy is a powerful tool, enabling non-invasive three-dimensional imaging deep within living organisms. Biological tissues, however, aberrate the wavefront of the light used by such microscopes, compromising both image signal and resolution. These aberrations ultimately limit the imaging depth and hold back our understanding of many biological processes that take place deep within living organisms. In this talk, I will discuss key technologies capable of overcoming this challenge and pushing the limits of traditional methods, including 3-photon microscopy and adaptive optics. I will show how we have implemented these innovative optical technologies to investigate the central nervous system, including imaging of synaptic structures in deep layers of the living mouse brain, and neuronal structures and somatosensory-evoked neuronal activity in the mouse spinal cord at unprecedented depths in vivo. Full-text article not available; see video presentation

  PublisherDOI

• Working with Statutes

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Presidential Authority to Decline to Follow Supreme Court Opinions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Coercion, Discretion, and the Roberts Court

  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · 2024-05-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Roberts court’s immigration jurisprudence has reinforced the discretionary powers of the government and sharply limited constitutional constraints on the exercise of those powers. As a result, the protection of immigrants’ rights increasingly has become a matter of executive grace. Discretion plays a crucial role in the execution of immigration law, and through its use, the executive can promote humanitarian objectives. But even when protective discretionary acts receive the imprimatur of courts, they do not provide lasting security because they are only as good as the policy preferences of the president in power. Indeed, discretion can also perpetuate overly aggressive enforcement in pursuit of those preferences. The checks the Roberts court has imposed on the operation of the enforcement system tend to reflect a skepticism of government, rather than a meaningful regard for the rights and interests of immigrants, leaving Congress as the only meaningful source of stability for the system and for immigrants themselves.

  PublisherDOI

• “Earthquakes or Earthmovers”: Place Memory and Literary Counterspace in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them

  Geocriticism and spatial literary studies · 2022-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Reading Regents and the Political Significance of Law

  The Supreme Court Review · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, in June 2020, advocates celebrated. DACA—an acronym that no longer requires definition—lived to see another day. Newspaper headlines marked the decision as a decisive rebuff of the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Obama-era program that shielded so-called Dreamers from deportation while authorizing them to work in the United States. Initiated in 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program had survived almost four years of a presidential administration overtly hostile to immigrants and immigration—a government bent on unraveling as much of the administrative and political legacy of its immediate predecessors as possible. The Supreme Court largely affirmed the Ninth Circuit’s holding that efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to rescind DACA were arbitrary and capricious and therefore invalid, sending DHS back to the drawing board to accomplish its objectives. With the 2020 presidential election less than five months away and the very real possibility of regime change in the air, the decision seemed decisive. The Supreme Court had saved DACA, at least for the time being. On the other side of the presidential election, we can now say that the Dreamers and their lawyers succeeded in using the courts to run out the clock on one of the more high-profile efforts of the Trump presidency. This success calls for an explanation. The original legal theory of DACA was predicated on its discretionary and therefore defeasible character. The government justified DACA as a series of individual acts of prosecutorial discretion, defined as the inherent discretion law enforcement officials possess to forbear from enforcement, at their convenience, in order to prioritize enforcement resources. DACA’s founding document—a memorandum issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security—included the disclaimer standard in Executive orders and agency guidance documents: “this memorandum confers no substantive right.” DACA’s promise, then, lasted as long as the Executive wanted it to. The promise was durable as long as President Obama remained in office but unenforceable should the Executive branch fall into the hands of officials hostile to the program.

  PublisherDOI

• Controlling the Enforcement Bureaucracy

  2020-09-17

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter demonstrates how the President’s control over immigration policy depends intimately on the structure and culture of the enforcement bureaucracy. These features of the bureaucracy in turn shape presidential policymaking. In particular, low-level executive branch officials play a crucial role in effectuating the enforcement power, as they are the ones responsible for the daily exercise of discretion within the system. To see how these dynamics have played out within the Executive Branch, the chapter studies the Obama administration’s efforts to centralize enforcement discretion in order to control line-level agents and contrasts those efforts with the early decisions of the Trump administration. It focuses on the attempts by political officials to tame the discretion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. President Obama’s efforts to discipline the decision-making of these line officials culminated in his two signature initiatives designed to insulate upward of five million unauthorized immigrants from removal. The bureaucratic reality of presidential immigration law has been on display equally during President Trump’s administration, including through efforts to centralize control over discretion where doing so has proven necessary to advancing the President’s policy agenda.

  PublisherDOI

• Sidelining the States

  2020-09-17

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter considers how federalism has played an important role in immigration enforcement and challenged presidents of both parties, thus helping to structure national debates over the place of immigrants in American society. The cooperation of state and local officials turns out to be critical to the project of locating and deporting immigration violators. Today, local officials work as formal and informal partners to the federal government, serve as sources of information and bureaucratic expertise, and provide personnel essential to federal enforcement efforts. The integration of federal and state officials into a single immigration enforcement bureaucracy has expanded and complicated the President’s power over immigration law. Particularly when immigration federalism has taken a partisan turn, powerful incentives have arisen for the President to co-opt, crush, or otherwise control local initiatives in order to push immigration policy in the administration’s preferred direction. Both the Obama and Trump eras provide vivid examples of this centralizing tendency. Presidential efforts to consolidate power in these circumstances has never been complete, however. Because the Executive Branch cannot escape its bureaucratic reliance on local institutions, the delegation of meaningful power to nonfederal officials remains part of the system whether presidential administrations like it or not.

  PublisherDOI

• Our Shadow Immigration System

  2020-09-17 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter explains how legal and institutional developments in immigration enforcement coincided with the dramatic acceleration of illegal immigration during the final third of the twentieth century. Together, these legal and demographic phenomena gave rise to a massive shadow immigration system that today operates alongside the formal immigration regime. This shadow system has rendered Congress’s intricate, detailed code of immigration rules increasingly less central to defining the content and character of the immigrant population. Instead, the Executive’s enforcement judgments—decisions about whom to target from the pool of deportable immigrants—have taken center stage. Indeed, the rise of the shadow system has effectively delegated vast screening authority to the President and other executive branch officials—authority that has culminated in events as dramatic as President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The large number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States today amplifies the role of enforcement discretion and further entrenches the shadow immigration system.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Adam B. Cox

  University of Portsmouth

  18 shared

• Laura Zúñiga Rodríguez

  Universidad de Salamanca

  8 shared

• Fernando Pérez Álvarez

  5 shared

• Lina Mariola Díaz Cortés

  4 shared

• Mario Maraver Gómez

  3 shared

• Juan Santos Vara

  Universidad de Salamanca

  3 shared

• Blanca Mendoza Buergo

  3 shared

• D. Botterill

  Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

  3 shared

Labs

• Rodríguez LabPI

Awards & honors

• Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Awards at the Scientific Inte…
• Beckman Young Investigator Award (2024)
• ISFS (Intersections Science Fellows Symposium) Fellow (2021)
• American Association of Physics Teachers award for outstandi…