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Social Policy Ph.D. students, 2012-2013
Ph.D. students in Social Policy pursue either the Ph.D. in Political Science & Social Policy (Government track) or the Ph.D. in Sociology & Social Policy (Sociology track). The degree field for each student is indicated in parentheses below.
P r o f i l e s
 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.
 Brielle Bryan
Sociology & Social Policy, G-1
Brielle graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2007 with a triple major in Sociology, Communication Studies, and Theatre and received her MPP from Georgetown Public Policy Institute in 2012. Her master’s thesis examined the relationship between childhood welfare receipt and career and financial expectations in young adulthood. Prior to coming to Harvard, Brielle worked as a research associate at the Urban Institute on the Welfare Rules Database and as a research assistant at the Foundation Center, a nonprofit that collects data on US foundation grant-making. Her broad research interests include poverty, educational inequality, neighborhood effects, social mobility, and the transition into adulthood. Brielle is particularly interested in the long-term effects of educational interventions and childhood public assistance receipt on aspirations, perceptions of opportunity, and adult labor market and educational outcomes.
 Peter Bucchianeri
Government & Social Policy, G-1
Peter Bucchianeri is a first year doctoral student in government and social policy. He grew up outside of San Francisco and attended UCLA, where he received his B.A. with highest departmental honors in Political Science in 2009. After graduation, Peter joined Teach for America and moved to Philadelphia, where he taught history, government and a little bit of everything else to high school students in an alternative education program. While in Philadelphia, Peter also completed his M.S. in Education at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests revolve primarily around how political institutions and party competition affect urban environments, the lives of their residents and the social policies that affect them in countries throughout the world. Additionally, as a former teacher, Peter is also particularly interested in education policy and the economics of education.
 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.
 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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 Diana Draghici
Government & Social Policy, G-2
Diana Draghici is a second-year graduate student pursuing a joint doctoral degree in Government and Social Policy. She holds a M.Sc. in Political Science from the University of Gothenburg, and has been a visiting student at the University of Michigan and University of California, Berkeley. Prior to enrolling in the graduate program at Harvard she worked as a research officer for quantitative data analyses in a large-scale longitudinal project at the University of London (UK). Diana’s substantive research interests are located at the intersection of macroeconomics, political science, and social policy. A research question of particular interest for her is how governments of different partisan affiliations in advanced OECD countries leverage social policy instruments to address the increasingly salient trade-offs between economic efficiency and redistribution under economic globalization. Diana’s methodological interests span a broad array of econometric and psychometric statistical techniques, both parametric and non-parametric. She has worked with various types of data configurations (survey, longitudinal, multilevel, and cross-sectional time-series data), and has programming experience with various statistical software packages, including Stata, SAS, SPSS, AMOS, R, Econometric Views, and MLwiN. Among her prominent methodological interests are data visualization, the implementation of advanced programming techniques to automate computational procedures, and statistical software development.
 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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 Sara Sternberg Greene
Sociology & Social Policy, G-6
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.
 Hope Harvey
Sociology & Social Policy, G-1
Hope is a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy. After she received her B.A. in sociology and anthropology from Carleton College, she spent a year in AmeriCorps working at a nonprofit in Austin, Texas as a case manager for people facing homelessness. In 2012, she earned her Master of Public Affairs from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Hope is interested in studying how disadvantage is transmitted across generations and how policy can increase intergenerational socioeconomic mobility.
 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.
 David Hureau
Sociology & Social Policy, G-5
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.
 Barbara Kiviat
Sociology & Social Policy, G-1
Barbara Kiviat is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and Social Policy. Her research interests lie at the intersection of household finance and poverty, and include the economics of kin networks, the structure of low-wage work, the impact of public benefits programs on financial behavior, and the causes and consequences of volatility in the lives of the poor. Barbara holds a B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. in journalism from Columbia University, and an M.P.A. from New York University, where she was a David Bohnett Public Service Fellow. As a research associate at NYU’s Financial Access Initiative, Barbara helped launch the U.S. Financial Diaries, a longitudinal study of the economic lives of 300 American families. Previously, Barbara was a staff writer at Time magazine. She has also written for Fortune, Money, The Miami Herald, The Arizona Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reuters, and TheAtlantic.com, among other outlets.
 Carlos Lastra Anadón
Government & Social Policy, G-1
Carlos Lastra is a first year doctoral student in government and social policy was born and raised in Asturias (Spain). He did his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Oxford and has worked as a consultant for several years, both for private companies and governments in Spain, Latin America and the Middle East. His research interests lie mostly in education and the role it can have in pursuing desirable societal outcomes (e.g. innovation, business creation) as part of an integrated economic policy. He is further interested in the institutional setup for the delivery of those policies and the role of governments in it versus the role of market players. His other interests lie in the Comparative Political Economy of European countries and of European integration and the impact of trade relations on politics.
 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.
 Eva Rosen
Sociology & Social Policy, G-6
Eva graduated from Barnard College in 2005 with a BA in Political Science and French and Francophone Studies. Before graduate school, she worked at the Center for Urban Research and Policy at Columbia University, doing research on topics including public housing and relocation in Chicago, gangs, the informal economy, and prisoner reentry. Eva conducted ethnographic research with sex workers in Chicago, examining sex work as a supplement to, or replacement for low-wage labor, as part of strategy to make ends meet. Since coming to Harvard, Eva has been involved with several research projects, including Professor Mary Waters' study of low-income mothers before and after Hurricane Katrina, as well as the ten-year qualitative review of Moving to Opportunity (MTO) in Baltimore with Professor Kathryn Edin. Eva's research interests include neighborhood effects, urban sociology, cultural sociology, migration, and crime and re-entry, and ethnographic methods. Her qualifying paper uses data from the PHDCN to examine heterogeneity in how residents experience disorder in Chicago neighborhoods. Eva’s dissertation looks at Baltimore neighborhoods with high rates of section 8 voucher concentration that have arisen in the wake of public housing demolition.
 Tracey Shollenberger
Sociology & Social Policy, G-5
Tracey Shollenberger earned her bachelors degree from the Pennsylvania State University in 2002. She started her career as a high school teacher in Baltimore, MD. Then she worked as a research associate at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center in Washington, DC. At Urban, she served as project manager for Returning Home-Texas, a longitudinal study of prisoner reentry, and for two action-research partnerships, including an NIJ-funded project aimed at reducing violence in correctional facilities. Her current work centers broadly around inequality in public education and in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Specific topics include the relationship between school quality and crime, trends in juvenile justice policy, and the impact of incarceration on children and families.
 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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 Alix Winter
Sociology & Social Policy, G-1
Alix received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Health and Societies. Her thesis focused on the effects of adolescents' perceptions of their futures on their current smoking behaviors. She then spent two years as a Research Assistant at the Understanding Autism project at Columbia University, where she analyzed statewide, administrative data and contributed to multiple peer reviewed articles. Her research interests include neighborhood effects on social and economic outcomes of well-being and social stratification in urban settings.
 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.
 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.
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