Lauren Reiko Yanase is a Master’s student in history at Portland State University and the Caroline P. Stoel Editorial Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year. She studies Asian migrant diasporas in the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a focus in environmental history. In 2024, she was awarded an Oregon Heritage Fellowship to continue her research on the Portland Assembly Center which detained 3,700 Japanese Oregonians and Washingtonians in 1942. She later published her research article, “‘Not fit for human habitation’: Portland’s Wartime Japanese American Detention Center,” in the Oregon Historical Quarterly (Spring 2025). Lauren is currently researching Japanese immigrant women’s experiences in early twentieth-century Oregon.