Gonzalez is a doctoral candidate (ABD) at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His research interests focus on political media, race and ethnic politics, Mexican, Central American and Middle Eastern immigrant populations, political violence, censorship, and death.

Gonzalez’s prior training in Political Science (New York University, MA) and International Relations and Middle East and Islamic Studies (San Francisco State University, BA) informs his interdisciplinary comparative lens on immigration and the digital divide. As a fourth-year PhD candidate, Gonzalez is also involved in the USC Equity Research Institute (formerly the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration) and the Hemispheric Americas Research Cluster.

Gonzalez is a facilitator for The Museum of Tolerance’s Combat Hate: A Digital Empowerment Workshop initiative, which seeks to combat white supremacist speech online, by instilling political and media literacy among middle and high school-aged students in lower-income areas throughout Southern California and New York. Gonzalez’s also collaborated with Partnership for LA Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District to better understand how COVID-19 and distance learning has impacted some of their most economically disenfranchised students. Some of these findings have been reported in the Los Angeles Times, NBC Los Angeles, and Telemundo.