Doctoral Fellows for 2012-2013
The program selects 8-12 new Doctoral Fellows each year from the participating Harvard Ph.D. programs. Doctoral Fellows join the program in their second or third year and maintain their affiliation through the dissertation stage.
AFRICAN AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES
Jacqueline Cooke-Rivers, G-7
ECONOMICS
Lorenzo Casaburi, G-6
James Feigenbaum, G-3
Simon Jäger, G-3
Aurélie Ouss, G-4
Matthew Resseger, G-6
Ryan Sakoda, G-4
Frank Schilbach, G-4
Benjamin Schoefer, G-4
Ugo Troiano, G-5
Crystal Yang, G-5
EDUCATION
Alejandro Ganimian, 4th yr
Ann Mantil, 3rd year
Beth Schueler, 3rd year
GOVERNMENT
Samuel Barrows, G-5
Amanda Garrett, G-7
Noam Gidron, G-3
John Marshall, G-3
Viridiana Rios, G-6
Ariel White, G-3
GOVERNMENT
& SOCIAL POLICY
Charlotte Cavaillé, G-5
Bernard Fraga , G-5
Michael Hankinson, G-3
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, G-3
Vanessa Williamson, G-4
Miya Woolfalk, G-7
HEALTH POLICY
Keren Ladin, G-5
Elizabeth Wikler, G-5
POLITICAL ECONOMY
& GOVERNMENT
Hye Young You, G-4
Oren Ziv, G-4
PSYCHOLOGY
Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, G-4
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PUBLIC POLICY
Natalie Bau, G-3
Sarah Cohodes, G-2
Will Dobbie, G-6
Daniel Honig, G-4
Elizabeth Linos, G-2
Ariel Dora Stern, G-4
Clara Zverina, G-5
SOCIOLOGY
Asad Asad, G-2
Kreg Steven Brown, G-4
Anny Fenton, G-3
Anthony Jack, G-5
Carly Knight, G-4
Theodore Leenman, G-2
Jeremy Levine, G-5
Christy Ley, G-3
Christopher Muller, G-6
Daniel Schrage, G-8
Jessica Simes, G-4
Benjamin Sosnaud, G-5
Jessica Tollette, G-3
Beth Truesdale, G-3
Holly Wood, G-5
SOCIOLOGY
& SOCIAL POLICY
Monica Bell, G-2
Deirdre Bloome, G-6
Anmol Chaddha, G-7
Nicole Deterding, G-6
Sara Sternberg Greene, G-6
David Hureau, G-5
Jackelyn Hwang, G-4
Kristin Perkins, G-3
Tracey Shollenberger, G-5
Daniel Wu, G-2
Queenie Zhu, G-4
DEPARTMENT LINKS
:: African & Af-American Studies
:: Economics
:: Education
:: Government
:: Health Policy
:: Political Economy & Govt
:: Psychology
:: Public Policy
:: Sociology
:: Social Policy
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P r o f i l e s
Asad Asad
Sociology, G-2
Asad L. Asad is a doctoral student in Sociology, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and a Fellow with the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy. Hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with comprehensive honors in May, 2011 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Asad's research interests encompass crime, law, and deviance; culture; inequality; international migration; political sociology; public policy; and urban sociology.
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Samuel Barrows
Government, G-5
Samuel is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Government. He graduated from St John’s College, Oxford, with a B.A. (1st Class Hons) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 2007. Samuel’s research interests lie at the intersection of political economy and political behavior. He is particularly interested in how the family influences people's preferences for government spending and redistribution, and how policy design shapes public opinion.
Natalie Bau
Public Policy, G-3
Natalie is a third year doctoral student in public policy. Originally from Pennsylvania, she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelors degree in economics and a secondary field in mathematical sciences from Harvard College in 2009. Before starting the doctoral program, she worked as a consultant in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank, researching private education and disaster relief in Pakistan and health care provision in India. She has conducted field research in India with the Centre for Microfinance. Natalie has received a Critical Language Scholarship in Hindi from the US State Department and a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Her current research interests include education economics and the intersection of development economics and industrial organization.
Monica C. Bell
Sociology & Social Policy, G-2
Monica was born and raised in Anderson, South Carolina. She received a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology from Furman University, where she was a Truman Scholar; an M.Sc. in Equality Studies from University College Dublin, where she was a Mitchell Scholar; and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was president of Yale Law Women and a senior editor of The Yale Law Journal. Before coming to Harvard, Monica was an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, where her primary focus was legislative advocacy related to D.C. public assistance policy. Prior to working at Legal Aid, Monica served as a law clerk for a federal district judge. In a previous life, Monica worked on local, state, and presidential campaigns in South Carolina. Monica’s writings have been published in the Washington Post, Education Week, the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, and other publications. Her academic interests include social welfare policy, rural and urban inequality, the adjudication of “poor people’s disputes” in courts and administrative agencies, and the complex relationships between race, gender, law, culture, and poverty.
Deirdre Bloome
Sociology & Social Policy, G-6
Deirdre is a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy and graduate Affiliate with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a BA in Sociology with Honors and holds a Certificate in Demography from Princeton University's Office of Population Research and a Masters in Statistics from Harvard. Deirdre's research interests include income and wealth inequality, intergenerational mobility, and quantitative methods. She is a Jacob K. Javits Fellow and a Doctoral Fellow with the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality.
Kreg Steven Brown
Sociology, G-4
Steven received his A.B. in sociology and African-American Studies from Princeton University in 2007. After graduation, he remained at Princeton where he worked as a research specialist in the Office of Population Research. His previous research examined how social connections and linked fate maintain black political unity despite diverging economic interests. His current research interests include racial and ethnic relations, networks and social capital, and racial differences in socioeconomic outcomes. In his free time, he enjoys listening to music, cooking, watching sports (especially the NBA).
Lorenzo Casaburi
Economics, G-6
Lorenzo is a sixth-year Ph.D. student in Economics. He grew up in Naples and received a B.A. in Economics from the University of Bologna in 2004. His research interests focus on development economics, social networks and international trade. Before joining the doctoral program at Harvard, he worked for two years in Western Kenya for the Poverty Action Lab coordinating the randomized evaluation of health and education projects. Previous research also focused on how manufacturing firms in Italy and in developing countries react to increased exposure to global competition. Lorenzo is a Doctoral Fellow at the Sustainability Science Program at the Center for International Development at Harvard. In the spare time, Lorenzo enjoys talking to friends in small quiet bars, traveling from small towns in Italy to more exotic places, and writing.
Charlotte Cavaillé
Government & Social Policy, G-5
Charlotte Cavaillé received her M.A in Political Science (with a minor in Middle Eastern Studies) from Sciences-po Paris in 2008. She spent a year at the University of Chicago as part of her undergrad program, an experience that opened up to her the world of American academia. In her undergraduate thesis, she studied Islam and public policy in the UK, focusing on the situation of publicly funded Islamic schools. Her research interests include religion and identity politics, the political economy of immigration and the politics of post-industrial societies with a focus on welfare state reform.
Anmol Chaddha
Sociology & Social Policy, G-7
Anmol Chaddha studies the political economy of racial and economic inequality. His current research examines how credit and debt have come to perform the functions of welfare policy, in the context of rising inequality and a weakened social safety net. He is broadly interested in how racial and economic inequality are shaped by direct state action, urban policy, and the political sphere. He has conducted research on racial and economic inequality within cities, including a project that assesses the role of industrial transformation in producing more unequal cities. He has also studied urban economic development, and he has examined the structure of informal work in low-wage industries in New York City and Chicago. Anmol is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and has been a visiting scholar at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He has co-authored journal articles with William Julius Wilson on the conceptualization of the ‘ghetto’ in sociological research and on urban ethnography. He earned a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Sarah Cohodes
Public Policy, G-2
Sarah Cohodes is a second-year doctoral student in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where her work focuses on the economics of education. Her research interests include school choice, teacher effectiveness, and accountability policies. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a research manager at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and as a research assistant at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. Sarah holds a B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College, where she also minored in educational policy and English literature, and an Ed.M. in education policy and management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Jacqueline Cooke-Rivers
African and African-American Studies, G-7
Jacqueline C. Rivers is currently a doctoral student in Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard University. From 1990 until September 2006 she served as Executive Director of MathPower, and between 2003 and 2005 she simultaneously played the role of ED for the National TenPoint Leadership Foundation. Mrs. Rivers began her career in non-profit and human resource management eighteen years ago, managing a staff of 79 and a budget of $1 million at what was then Boston City Hospital. She founded and managed MathPower, an education consulting organization that focuses exclusively on providing support education to low income, minority students in the Boston Public Schools. MathPower has become an influential voice in mathematics education reform in the city of Boston, and plays a meaningful role at the state level. Mrs. Rivers has worked on issues of social justice and Christian activism in the black community for more than twenty years, committing her personal and professional life in service to the inner city youth of Boston. Mrs. Rivers serves on the Board of The Ella J. Baker House, the separate 501 (c)(3) non-profit originally created by the Azusa Christian Community, which provides street intervention, education and mentoring for hundreds of youths in Dorchester and elsewhere in Boston each year. Jacqueline Rivers was born and raised in Jamaica. She was educated at Harvard University, (B.A., summa cum laude, M.A., both in psychology.) She lives in the Dorchester neighborhood of inner city of Boston, Massachusetts with her husband, Reverend Eugene F. Rivers 3d, and their two children.
Nicole Deterding
Sociology & Social Policy, G-6
Nicole Deterding is a 6th year graduate student in Joint Doctoral Program in Social Policy and Sociology. Her current research interests lie in stratification processes, educational transitions, and policies that aim to mediate educational inequality. Nicole's research at Harvard has focused on the educational experiences of students who are not immediately bound for four-year college. Her dissertation uses six years of survey and interview data from The RISK Project to examine how a group of economically disadvantaged young mothers navigate the increasingly complex landscape of post-secondary programs in pursuit of economic stability and social mobility. Prior to coming to Harvard, Nicole was a Research Associate at The Urban Institute, where she worked on several multi-site, mixed methods program evaluations of education interventions, in both K-12 and higher education settings. She holds a M.A. in Education Policy from The George Washington University and a B.A. in Sociology from Wellesley College.
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Will Dobbie
Public Policy, G-6
Will Dobbie is a sixth-year doctoral student in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, concentrating in labor economics and the economics of education. Will is conducting research on the school production function and the impact of consumer bankruptcy protection on debtors. He holds a B.A. in economics from Kalamazoo College and a M.A. in economics from the University of Washington in Seattle.
James Feigenbaum
Economics, G-3
James Feigenbaum is a third year PhD student in the Department of Economics at Harvard University whose primary research interests lie at the intersection of labor, development, and economic history. His current research considers both the short and long term effects of slavery in the American South, particularly antebellum slave literacy restrictions and slave insurrections. Previous work explored the relationship between campaign contributions, expenditures, and electoral viability in US presidential primaries. James received his BA with High Honors in economics and mathematics from Wesleyan University in 2008.
Anny Fenton
Sociology, G-3
Anny Fenton hails from Maine and is a PhD student in Sociology. Her research focuses on economic sociology, education, inequality, race and ethnicity. She is currently focused on two research areas: (1) examining the effect changing community demographics has on nationalist parties in the UK and (2) how people's economic activity and relationships are influenced when they engage in new consumption practices like car sharing and time banks that blur the line between private and public goods and services. Prior to entering the PhD program, Anny worked as a management consultant for PA Consulting Group. She holds an AB in Sociology (magna cum laude) from Cornell University.
Bernard L. Fraga
Government & Social Policy, G-5
Bernard L. Fraga is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Government and Social Policy. He received his B.A. in Political Science and Linguistics from Stanford University. Bernard's research interests are in the areas of American political behavior, electoral politics and policy, and racial and ethnic politics. His dissertation project demonstrates that partisanship and intra-party politics have a direct impact on the role race plays in shaping political behavior, as observed through the analysis of elections at both the primary and general election level. Bernard has also completed work exploring the effect of electoral competitiveness on voter turnout, and analyzed the participatory impact of the language provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
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Alejandro Ganimian
Education (Ed.D.), 4th year
Alejandro J. Ganimian is a doctoral student in Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he is a Presidential Scholar. He currently works for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project. He has worked for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Partnership for Educational Revitalization in the Americas (PREAL). He is the co-founder of Educar y Crecer (EyC), an initiative that offers remedial education in math and reading to children in slums in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and of Enseñá por Argentina (EpA), an effort to recruit the country’s best and brightest college graduates to teach in schools serving the poor for at least two years. His current work focuses on the challenges in using school performance metrics for accountability purposes in developing countries (with Felipe Barrera-Osorio) and on how to link international large-scale assessments (with Daniel Koretz). His dissertation work is based on a randomized field trial of a school incentives program in the province of Punjab, Pakistan (with Felipe Barrera-Osorio and Dhushyanth Raju). He holds a master's degree in educational research from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates scholar, and an undergraduate degree in international politics from Georgetown University.
Amanda Garrett
Government, G-7
Amanda Garrett (B.A. Political Science, UC Berkeley; A.M. Government, Harvard University) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Government department at Harvard working in the field of comparative politics. She is also currently a doctoral fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School's Multidisciplinary Program for Inequality and Social Policy and an affiliate at the Center for European Studies. Amanda's specific research interests lie in pursuing an interdisciplinary analysis of the international, political, and economic dynamics affecting immigrant and minority integration, primarily with respect to flows from the Middle East/North Africa to the United States and Western Europe. She has worked on a number of projects examining the presence of Islam in Western Europe, the influence of remittances on integration, and immigrant inequality vis-à-vis comparative welfare states, local governance and urban rioting. Her dissertation, entitled "When Cities Fight Back", will focus specifically on examining the causes and consequences of variation in patterns of local-level conflict and urban rioting across 4 European cities as they relate to minority incorporation practices. Using mixed methodologies, Amanda looks at the role of local political stability in institutionalizing fixed patterns of minority participation, for better and worse. She has recently completed field work in Europe and plans to defend her dissertation in May of 2013.
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Noam Gidron
Government, G-3
Noam Gidron is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of Government. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics and received a BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 2009. His research interests lie in the intersection of party politics, political sociology and the comparative political economy of the advanced democracies. He is especially interested in the relationship between party politics and the welfare state, and how it evolved over time.
Sara Sternberg Greene
Sociology & Social Policy, G-6
Inequality & Criminal Justice Fellow
Sara graduated from Yale University in 2002 with a B.A. in Political Science. Sara then attended Yale Law School, where she was a Notes Editor of the Yale Law Journal and an Articles Editor of the Yale Law and Policy Review. Before starting her PhD, Sara clerked for a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and practiced law at a small firm in Boston focused on affordable housing law. Sara's scholarship broadly concerns the relationship between law and inequality. Specifically, her current work focuses on the impact of financial laws on low- and moderate- income families, and her interests span bankruptcy, commercial law, contracts, tax, and health law. Sara's article, The Broken Safety Net: A Study of Earned Income Tax Credit Recipients and a Proposal for Repair, is forthcoming in the NYU Law Review. Sara has several articles in progress, including an article on repeat bankruptcy filers, an article on predicting success in chapter 13 bankruptcy, an article on debt management strategies of low-income workers, and an article on culture and access to civil justice.
Michael Hankinson
Government & Social Policy, G-3
Michael attended the University of Virginia, where he received a B.A. in Government and Environmental Thought & Practice in 2010. An Echols Scholar, Michael graduated as a Distinguished Major, receiving high honors for his thesis examining the relationship between racially-based housing policy and community vulnerability to environmental hazards in Camden, New Jersey. During his time at U.Va., Michael wrote extensively on housing and land-use policy, specifically eminent domain, exclusionary zoning, and mortgage insurance discrimination. Michael’s current research focuses on the nexus of housing policy and inequality, encompassing issues of urban development, suburban sprawl, and political representation. Away from the books, Michael enjoys rowing, cooking, Crossfit, and mastering Scriabin etudes.
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez
Government & Social Policy, G-3
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez received his B.A. with honors in Political Science from Northwestern University in 2008. During his time at Northwestern, he spent two years researching the political economy of social and tax policy reform in Latin America. After graduation he received a fellowship from the Roosevelt Institute to work at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC with a focus on health reform, Social Security, and social policy. His current research interests include social insurance, economic policy, inequality, and the politics of welfare state reform. Alexander also enjoys attempting to cook, sailing, and marathon running.
Daniel Honig
Public Policy, G-4
Dan is a 4th year doctoral candidate in Public Policy. Dan’s interests focus on the political economy of organizational behavior, particularly the role of the discretion individuals exercise in implementing policies, be they related to the US federal social safety net or donor-catalyzed development projects in the developing world. While some component of the variance in the exercise of discretion is of course idiosyncratic and unsystematic, Dan believes that at least some of it is not, grounded instead on systematic features of who personnel are and how (and by whom) they are managed. Dan believes systematic investigation of these features will yield a better understanding of the gap between de jure rule-making and de factoimplementation. Prior to beginning his doctoral work Dan served in a variety of positions in international development, including as special assistant to the Minister of Finance (Liberia), running a nonprofit focused on youth and agricultural entrepreneurship (East Timor), and working for local and international NGOs in India, Thailand, and Israel. A proud Detroiter, Dan holds a BA from the University of Michigan and did masters’ work at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. Dan is currently a visiting academic at University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations (AY 12/13).
David Hureau
Sociology & Social Policy, G-5
Inequality & Criminal Justice Fellow
David Hureau is a fifth-year student in the program in Sociology and Social Policy and a Research Fellow for the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School. David received his BA from Wesleyan University in 2001 with a major in African American Studies and History, and his MPP from the Kennedy School of Government in 2006, with a concentration in Criminal Justice Policy. His research interests include youth violence, gangs, urban neighborhoods, youth development, social networks and micro-sociology. Prior to joining the Program in Sociology and Social Policy, David served for three years as the Program Director of the New Outlook Teen Center in Exeter, NH and for two years as a Researcher in the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School. During his time at the Kennedy School, David worked very closely with Anthony Braga researching the dynamics of violent crime in Boston, and was centrally involved in many gang violence interventions in the city. A resident of Dorchester, David feels a strong connection to Boston's neighborhoods and people and is committed to the rigorous and responsible study of Boston.
Jackelyn Hwang
Sociology and Social Policy, G-4
Jackelyn Hwang is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Social Policy. She received her B.A.S. with honors in Sociology and Mathematics from Stanford University in 2007. Her senior thesis, which earned the Stanford Firestone Medal, focused on racial divisions in perceptions of neighborhood boundaries during gentrification. After graduating from Stanford, she worked in education management for a community-based charter school in West Philadelphia. Her research interests include community and urban sociology, neighborhood effects, urban inequality, segregation, race and ethnicity, and education. Her recent work develops alternative methods for detecting gentrification and examines various factors shaping trajectories of gentrification in urban neighborhoods.
Anthony Jack
Sociology, G-5
Anthony Abraham Jack is a doctoral student in Sociology. He graduated from Amherst College in 2007 with a BA in Women’s and Gender Studies and Religion (cum laude). His research interests include Race and Ethnic Relations, Cultural Sociology, Sociology of Education, and Life Course Theory. His work examines the effect of corporate-sponsored education initiatives that place lower-income minority youth into boarding, day, and preparatory schools in high school on (1) the composition of the minority student population at elite colleges and universities and (2) the experiences of lower-income undergraduates therein more specifically. Anthony also researches antiracism strategies of stigmatized groups in the United States (along with Michele Lamont, Harvard University).
Simon Jäger
Economics, G-3
Simon is a PhD candidate in economics. Prior to coming to Harvard, Simon studied economics at the University of Bonn and at the University of California, Berkeley graduating with a BSc and an MSc from Bonn. His research interests lie at the intersection of public, labor, and behavioral economics. His work is aimed at understanding the sources and consequences of inequality in the labor market.
Carly Knight
Sociology, G-4
Carly Knight is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and a graduate affiliate with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Prior to joining the department, she graduated from Duke University with a double major in Economics and Political Science. She is currently a Doctoral Fellow with the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her current research focuses on American law and economic inequality.
Keren Ladin
Health Policy, G-5
Keren Ladin is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Health Policy PhD program. She graduated with General and Departmental Honors from the University of Chicago with an AB in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine in 2005, and received an SM in from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2007. Her Masters’ Thesis, which was awarded the departmental thesis prize and subsequently published, examined disparities in late-life depression across Europe. After graduating, Keren received a Graduate Research Award from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to pursue research examining social inequality and health gradients as a Research Fellow at the Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging (MEA). Keren’s current research interests include: health disparities (primarily in the areas of aging, mental health, and renal transplantation), and the role of social networks in acute medical decision-making. As a rare example in American healthcare of a fully insured condition, Keren’s dissertation examines the roles of patient characteristics and social network factors in explaining persistent racial disparities in renal transplantation. She uses mixed methods to study resource allocation for vulnerable populations, healthcare decision-making in acute situations, and the role of social networks on disparities in life chances.
Theodore Leenman
Sociology, G-2
Theodore is PhD student in sociology. His research interests are situated at the intersection of education and politics. In particular, he seeks to addresses the sources of socioeconomic and racial inequalities in these two systems. With respect to education, he is currently analyzing how congruence between parenting and teaching strategies affects students’ classroom participation and test scores. His interest in politics is motivated by the question of how minority and impoverished (socially and economically) groups gain “voice” in electoral and policy outcomes. Most recently, he is engaged in research combining these two bodies of work that seeks to determine how the framing of education policies that would presumably benefit disadvantaged students affects the programs’ political feasibility. Theodore received his A.B. (summa cum laude) from Cornell University where he also completed minors in Spanish, International Relations, and Inequality Studies. He hails from West Haven, Vermont.
Jeremy Levine
Sociology, G-5
Jeremy received his B.A. in History and Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2008. He has received previous fellowships to work with a non-profit community development corporation in Detroit, and the Mayor’s Office in Boston. Jeremy is currently working on three research projects: The first investigates the geography of interorganizational resource networks in the inner city; the second analyzes the relationship between neighborhood racial composition and requests for public goods; and the third, his dissertation, is an ethnography of local politics and inner city redevelopment. Each project shares a focus on inequality, urban neighborhoods, and local political processes.
Christy Ley
Sociology, G-3
Christy Ley is a PhD student in Sociology. Her research focuses on gender and racial inequalities and cultural dynamics in organizations and work. Her current research projects, in particular, examine the relationship among physical appearance, occupational choices, and career experiences. Prior to entering the PhD program, Ley worked as a legal analyst for a global asset management firm. She holds an AB in Sociology (magna cum laude) from Cornell University.
Elizabeth Linos
Public Policy, G-2
Elizabeth Linos is a second year PhD student in Public Policy. Originally from Athens, Greece, she graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in Government and Economics. After graduation, she worked with the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) on the evaluation of social programs in various settings that included a new micro-entrepreneurship project in Morocco and a female empowerment program in Bangladesh. She then worked for the Greek Prime Minister as an advisor on social innovation and public sector reform. Elizabeth is currently interested in the relationship between income inequality and public goods provision, and is generally interested in public economics, anti-poverty programs and social innovation.
Ann Mantil
Education, 3rd year
Ann Mantil is a third-year doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She holds a BA from Williams College in political science and an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. Prior to coming to HGSE, she worked for nine years as a classroom teacher and administrator at charter schools in Oakland, CA and Washington, DC. She is broadly interested in the distributional effects of educational policies and practices. Her research focuses on how district and school-level structures such as student assignment policies, tracking and within-class ability grouping, and high-stakes testing impact the achievement of low-income children.
John Marshall
Government, G-3
John principally studies the comparative political economy of industrialized societies, generally employing formal and statistical methods. In particular, he is interested in party and electoral competition across multiple policy dimensions, institution formation and political responses to globalization. His current research examines party competition, income inequality, tax policy and electoral turnout. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics and received a BA from St Anne's College, Oxford in 2008. Subsequently, he received an MSc in Politics Research (Comparative Politics) from Nuffield College, Oxford in 2010. In the year between his studies he worked as a financial services and statistical researcher in the House of Commons Library.
Christopher Muller
Sociology, G-6
Inequality & Criminal Justice Fellow
Christopher Muller is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology. He received his B.A. in public policy from Brown University. Chris worked for three years as a policy research associate at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. His research interests include slavery, incarceration, inequality, historical sociology, and economic history.
Aurélie Ouss
Economics, G-4
Inequality & Criminal Justice Fellow
Aurélie Ouss is fourth-year student in the economics department. Originally from Paris, she studied ethnography and economics at Ecole Normale Supérieure and Paris School of Economics. She then moved to Morocco, where she ran field experiments on conditional cash transfers and microcredits as an RA in development economics for Poverty Action Lab (JPAL). Closer to home, she worked in French prisons and in the French Department of Prison Administration. While there, she became interested in understanding the effects of judicial policies on recidivism and labor market prospects, and how families and communities are affected by high incarceration rates. She aims to measure how incarcerations reinforce inequalities, even outside prison walls.
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Kristin Perkins
Sociology & Social Policy, G-3
Kristin Perkins is a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy. Originally from Indiana, Kristin earned a B.S. in Urban and Regional Studies from Cornell University and a Master of City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. She spent two years as a researcher at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development where she examined the effects of concentrated foreclosure in New York and the impact of the agency's subsidized housing on health outcomes of its residents. Her research interests include housing and neighborhoods, residential stability, and community and urban sociology.
Matthew Resseger
Economics, G-6
Matt Resseger is a 6th year student in the Economics PhD program at Harvard. A native of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, Matt received his B.A. in Economics and Math from Williams College in 2005. Following college, he spent two years working as a Research Assistant at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, focusing on retirement policy. Matt studies public, labor and urban economics, and his current research interests include the effects of local government policies on labor markets and urban growth as well as the relationship between internal migration and inequality in the US. When not working on his research, Matt enjoys running, tennis, classical music, and holding out hope for Cleveland's ill-fated sports teams.
Viridiana Rios
Government, G-6
Inequality & Criminal Justice Fellow
Viridiana Rios studies drug trafficking, violence and corruption in Mexico. Her research agenda aims to solve several puzzles about organized crime from our ability to accurately measure drug-related violence, to our understanding of drug cartels' behavior/mobility, and the link between corruption and criminal violence. She regularly serves as a consultant and security policy adviser to private and public institutions in the US and Mexico, and she has worked as an adviser to the Mexican President’s Security Spokesman. Before enrolling at Harvard, Viridiana studied Political Science at ITAM, in Mexico City. She has also worked and researched at the Center for US-Mexico Studies (UCSD), the Trans-border Institute (USD), the Counter-terrorism Committee at the United Nations, USAID and Mexico's Ministry of Social Development.
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Ryan Sakoda
Economics, G-4
Inequality & Criminal Justice Fellow
Ryan grew up in Huntington Beach, CA and graduated from UC Berkeley in 2003 with a B.A. in economics. After college, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine from 2004-2006 where he taught economics and English to high school and college students. In the 2006-2007 academic year, Ryan completed the M.Sc. in economics at the London School of Economics as a Fulbright Scholar. Upon his return to the U.S., Ryan began law school at Yale where he will return in 2011 to complete the final year of his law degree. Ryan plans to dedicate his academic career to learning how policing, sentencing policy, and prisons affect poverty and inequality in America.
Frank Schilbach
Economics, G-4
Frank Schilbach is a fourth-year PhD candidate in economics whose primary interests are in development and behavioral economics. He has been mainly working on projects in Kenya (fertilizer use) and India (household decision-making). Frank graduated in 2008 from Mannheim University with a Diplom in Economics and earned an M.A. in Economics from UC Berkeley in 2009.
Benjamin Schoefer
Economics, G-4
Benjamin Schoefer is a fourth-year PhD candidate in economics and focuses on public finance, labor economics and finance. He graduated with an AB in economics, with a minor in government, from Harvard College in 2009. He is currently also a fellow at Harvard's Project on Justice, Welfare and Economics and an NBER Nonprofit Fellow.
Daniel Schrage
Sociology, G-8
Dan Schrage studies labor market discrimination, the spatial distribution of labor markets, and statistical methods aimed at improving research in these and other policy-related areas. He received his A.B. in computer science from Harvard in 2001, where he focused on computational economics. Before coming to graduate school, he spent four years doing research in artificial intelligence at a think tank in Cambridge. He is currently working on a project exploring the effects of a variety of hiring and recruitment practices on diversity in the managerial workforce. He is also examining the spatial mismatch hypothesis in urban labor markets. Dan grew up in the rural town of Salem, Illinois, then spent his adolescence trying to get his head around city life in downtown Phoenix. He was socialized at an early age into a lifelong passion for the St. Louis Cardinals, and in his spare time he enjoys spinning, producing, and dancing to the blips and bleeps of electronic music.
Beth Schueler
Education, 3rd year
Beth is a 3rd year doctoral student in the Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice concentration at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and holds an M.A. in Politics and Education from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Her research interests relate to the role of out-of-school contexts, such as neighborhoods, families, afterschool, and summer programs, in influencing children’s academic outcomes. Beth formerly worked on legislative affairs for a New York City Councilmember representing West Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood. Before moving to the East Coast, she was Director of Operations for an academic summer camp company based in California and coached competitive policy debate at the high school and college level.
Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington
Psychology, G-4
Jennifer is a fourth year graduate student in the Psychology Department, based in the research lab of Prof. Jim Sidanius. Jennifer’s work explores the interaction among psychological mechanisms underpinning our experience of power on the one hand, and of social group membership on the other. Jennifer’s current research explores the behavioral dynamics of inequality, focusing on the influence of poverty and low status on cognition and self-regulation, with implications ranging from academic achievement to political participation. Jennifer graduated with honors in Psychology and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, and top in her class at the London School of Economics with an MS in Social Psychology. She also spent three years working for the UK Government as a Senior Strategic Analyst advising on the psychology of conflict, and has most recently completed a fellowship at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, where she studied peer retaliation against whistleblowers of institutional corruption.
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Tracey Shollenberger
Sociology & Social Policy, G-5
Tracey Shollenberger is a doctoral student in the Sociology and Social Policy program. Her work centers around inequality in public education and in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. She has studied a range of topics including school accountability, school discipline, violence prevention, and the impact of incarceration on children and families. Before entering graduate school, Tracey worked as a high school teacher in Baltimore, MD, and as a research associate at the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center. At Urban, she contributed to several projects including Returning Home—a longitudinal study of prisoner reentry—and a national survey of juvenile justice professionals.
Jessica Simes
Sociology, G-4
Jessica Simes is a PhD student in Sociology and a Graduate Affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Originally from Arcadia, CA, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Occidental College with a BA in Sociology and a minor in Critical Theory and Social Justice in May 2009. Her senior honors thesis focused on the implications of white flight patterns from racially diverse suburbs in California, particularly those with large Asian communities. Her current research agenda addresses the spatial dynamics of incarceration in the United States and the ways social policy regulates the relationship between imprisonment and neighborhood structures.
Benjamin Sosnaud
Sociology, G-5
Benjamin Sosnaud is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. He received his B.A. in Sociology and Political Science from Duke University. His primary research interests include social inequality and stratification, health inequalities, poverty, and political institutions. His current research focuses on health inequalities in the United States. Past research projects include an examination of linkages between class inequalities and voting behavior and an analysis of the effects of living wage ordinances in U.S. cities.
Ariel Dora Stern
Public Policy, G-4
Ariel is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She graduated with the distinction Presidential Scholar from Dartmouth College, with an A.B. in Economics (high honors) and completed an M.A. in Economics at the Free University of Berlin and Hunter College. Ariel has been a researcher at the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Boston and the German Institue of Economic Research in Berlin. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Ariel also worked as an economist on Wall Street and at LeapFrog Investments, an impact investment fund. Ariel's research focuses on health inequalities, productivity in healthcare, innovation and technology adoption. Ariel is a two-time national collegiate figure skating champion and also enjoys alpine skiing and snowboarding, squash and soccer.
Jessica Tollette
Sociology, G-3
Jessica Tollette is a PhD student in Sociology. Originally from California, Jessica earned a B.A. in Communication and Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to graduate school, she spent two years as a management consultant in New York City. Her research interests broadly include race, ethnicity and immigration.
Ugo Troiano
Economics, G-5
Ugo Troiano is currently a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. His main fields of interest are labor economics, public economics and political economics. His current research focuses on the economic effects of fiscal rules on public finance outcomes using quasi-experimental designs. Previous research dealt with the connection of economic growth and political accountability. Before coming to Harvard he received a B.A. and a M.Sc. in Economics from Bocconi University in 2006 and 2008, respectively.
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Beth Truesdale
Sociology, G-3
Beth Truesdale is a third-year doctoral student in Sociology. Her academic interests include labor markets, education policy, and urban sociology, and her current research examines the choices workers make as they age. Before coming to Harvard, Beth worked in London as a journalist and researcher. She also spent several years at a start-up company, where she led teams of analysts in creating reports that helped to shape UK public policy on the future of the BBC, regional spatial planning, the use of generic drugs by the National Health Service, and other controversial topics. Beth's previous degrees are in chemistry, English, history, and theology. She studied at St. Olaf College and at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Ariel White
Government, G-3
Ariel White is a third-year graduate student in the Government department, with research interests in race, representation, voting rights, and incarceration. She received a B.A. in Government and Economics from Cornell University in 2009. Before entering the PhD program, she worked at a legal services office in Ithaca, NY.
Elizabeth Wikler
Health Policy, G-5
Elizabeth McCarthy Wikler graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 2005 with an AB in Social Studies and a certificate in Health Policy. She received a fellowship from Harvard's Center for American Political Studies for her undergraduate senior thesis, an examination of how notions of individual responsibility shape US obesity policy. After graduating, Beth received a Bill Emerson Fellowship from the Congressional Hunger Center, a program to train leaders in anti-poverty policy. Her fellowship began with a placement at FoodChange, an anti-hunger group in New York, where Beth co-authored and presented an analysis of immigrant access to food stamp benefits. In 2006, her fellowship continued at Families USA, a consumer health advocacy and research organization in Washington DC, where she was then hired full-time as a Health Policy Analyst. From 2006 to 2008, Beth wrote Families USA publications on topics including the uninsured, medical debt, and state health policy reforms. In the fall of 2008, she entered Harvard's PhD Program in Health Policy. Her research interests include: the impact of US health care reform, particularly on administrative expenditures and Medicaid enrollment, and levels of interest in early medical testing for Alzheimer's disease in the US and abroad.
Vanessa Williamson
Government and Social Policy, G-4
Vanessa Williamson is a PhD candidate in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University, and a coauthor, with Theda Skocpol, of the forthcoming book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Her primary research interest is the politics of taxation. Before coming to Harvard, she served at the Policy Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. She received her BA in French language and literature from NYU, and her MA from NYU's Institute of French Studies.
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Holly Wood
Sociology, G-5
Holly Wood received her B.A. with High Honors in Sociology from Wesleyan University in 2008. Her honors thesis at Wesleyan addressed the continually limited representation of low-income students at America's most elite private colleges, examining how cultural capital translates into advantage within the college admissions process despite the proliferation of institutional initiatives to increase student diversity. This project heightened her interest in examining the familial anxiety surrounding class status reproduction and how individual-level processes manifest into macro-level consequences. Thus, Holly's main academic interests revolve around identifying the social mechanisms which perpetuate inequality and stratification. This interest compels her to examine how welfare and other aspects of social policy are experienced in America today. Currently, she is investigating how families navigate public housing policy options in inner-city Boston.
Miya Woolfalk
Government & Social Policy, G-7
Miya Woolfalk (A.M. Government, Harvard University; B.A. History, Stanford University) is a Ph.D. candidate in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University. Her research interests are in the fields of American political behavior, racial and ethnic politics, and social policy and inequality. Her current work focuses on the role of social contexts in shaping individual political preferences and behaviors.
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Daniel Wu
Sociology & Social Policy, G-2
How do organizations strategize and navigate socio-political institutions in order to implement and change policies that address the structural roots of urban inequality and build more resilient communities? In our increasingly privatized state, public policies are not simply implemented by state actors, but are materialized in coordination with private entrepreneurs. These actors must navigate not only economic but also cultural and political realms. Dan explores how they do so effectively (or ineffectively) and what implications their actions have for public policy as it happens on the ground. To examine these actors and their impacts, Dan connects micro-level analyses of these organizations with their strategies on political fields. For my current project, Dan examines how social benefit corporations, such as nonprofits that develop affordable housing, navigate urban redevelopment politics and innovate their strategies. These actors understand and respond to changing demographic and increasingly hostile contexts. Due to this empirical interest, Dan draws from social movements/organizations, organizational behavior, and learning theories.
Crystal Yang
Economics, G-5
Crystal Yang is a fifth-year student in the economics department. Originally from Colorado, Crystal graduated from Harvard College in 2008 with a BA summa cum laude in Economics and MA in Statistics. Her main fields of interest are labor economics, public economics and law and economics. Crystal has worked in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston, and the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Crystal's current research looks at the impact of judicial discretion on disparities in federal sentencing.
Hye Young You
Political Econmy & Government, G-4
Hye Young is a fourth-year PhD student in the program of political economy & government. Before coming to Harvard, Hye Young received a B.A. in international relations and economics from Seoul National University in Seoul, South Korea and a M.A. in political science from University of Chicago. Her research interests include American politics, political economy of trade policy, and applied contract theory. Specifically, she focuses under what conditions politicians have an incentive to inform or misinform voters, and how information asymmetry between politicians and voters generating from different political conditions affects the social welfare, inequality, and political representation in general. In her spare time, Hye Young enjoys playing and watching tennis, running, and drinking wine.
Queenie Zhu
Sociology and Social Policy, G-4
Queenie Zhu is a fourth-year doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy. A native of Los Angeles, CA, she graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, San Diego with a B.A. in Sociology and in Human Development, and a minor in Education Studies. Prior to joining Harvard’s department, she was actively involved in research at UCSD’s Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence (CREATE) and worked at UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) on issues of educational opportunity and access. Broadly, Queenie’s academic interests include educational inequality, stratification, immigration, race and ethnicity, and urban sociology. Her current work examines how school composition contributes to educational outcomes, the ramifications of the suburbanization of poverty, and the transition to adulthood among inner-city youth.
Oren Ziv
Political Economy & Government, G-4
Oren is a fourth year in the Economics track of the PEG program. His research focuses on urban and social economics, trade, and political economy. He graduated magna cum lauda with a BA from Columbia university with a double major in Economics and Philosophy. He is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a New England University Transportation Center fellow.
Clara Zverina
Public Policy, G-5
Clara is a fifth-year student in the Public Policy PhD program. She graduated
with a BA(Hons) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University in
2004. After spending two years in investment banking, focusing on the health
care industry, Clara returned to university to earn a Masters in Public
Administration in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School in
2008. As a PhD student, she studies Public Economics and Political Economy. Her
current research focuses on the political economy of social security reform in
Europe, as well as determinants of political organization of the elderly. Clara
is a Presidential Fellow at Harvard University. In her free time, she enjoys playing the flute and piano, alpine skiing, and volunteering for the Big Sister Association of Greater Boston.
