Our PhD in Social Policy (SPOL) doctoral students are registered at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Harvard Griffin GSAS) and delve into a range of research areas during their time at Harvard.

Our current SPOL students are listed below.

James Biblarz

Stratification and inequality; crime and incarceration, and social networks. Constitutional law, local government law, law and sociology, and the history of school desegregation.

Brian Highsmith

Fiscal federalism, state/local tax and budget policy, public goods, residential segregation, criminal punishment, political economy, antitrust and corporate power, and law and legal institutions.

Andrew byrne Keefe

Crime, criminal law, and criminal justice; economic inequality; empire; mass incarceration; network analysis; policing; political economy; political sociology; and race and racism.

Nicholas Lillios

American politics. Networks, influence, and participation in bureaucratic policymaking.

Evan MacKay

Inequality and social policy; crime, deviance, restoration, and punishment; social stratification; race and ethnicity; gender; discrimination; geography; poverty; and quantitative methods.

Abigail Mariam

Urban policy, neighborhoods, community institutions, homelessness and housing, poverty, race and ethnicity, local social networks, volunteerism, and local policymaking.

Alexandra Mitukiewicz

Work, inequality, social policy, demography, aging, retirement.  

Nefara Riesch

Race and ethnicity, poverty and inequality, criminal legal system, labor markets, policing, quantitative methods, and social policy.

Cierra Robson

Racial inequality, technological advancement, surveillance, criminal justice, policing, social policy, and AI ethics.

Nicholas Short

American political economy and economic inequality; the politics of the American knowledge economy.

Andreja Siliunas

Family Demography; Stratification; and Social Policy.

Lauren Taylor

Stratification and inequality, demography, labor markets, and the welfare state.

Elizabeth Thom

American politics, social policy, political economy, and geography. 

Jacob Waggoner

American politics, institutions, and power. Land use law, administrative law, and criminal law.

Lilly Yu

Social inequality, criminal justice policy, and punishment. The impact of criminal justice reform and justice-based interventions and their intersection with issues of gender, race, and immigration.

Michael Zanger-Tishler

Criminology, sociology of punishment, race, ethnicity and migration, quantitative methods, comparative sociology, social theory, inequality and social policy, antisemitism, Middle Eastern studies, and law and society.