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.

David Arbelaez

Inequality, intergenerational social mobility, and organizational sociology in the context of higher education.

Marco Avina

Racial and ethnic politics as well as public opinion and political behavior.

Mary Soledad Craig

Intergroup relations, with a focus on racial and ethnic politics, inequality, and immigration.

Kseniya Dzhala

Crime, law, and punishment; gender; family; social policy; social movements and collective action; public opinion; mixed methods.

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.

Zheng Ma

Political economy, social policy, and computational social science.

Evan MacKay

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

Alexandra Mitukiewicz

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

Siri Neerchal

Inequality, social determinants of health, social policy, labor, occupational health, LGBTQ health, gender identity, survey methods, quantitative methods.

Dylan Nguyen

Spatial inequality urban and community sociology, organizations, race and ethnicity, housing, inequality and stratification.

Charlotte O’Herron

Gender and racial inequalities in work, occupations, and wealth; family; intersectionality; qualitative methods; quantitative methods; economic sociology.

Nefara Riesch

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

Lauren Taylor

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

Ben TerMaat
Elizabeth Thom

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

Jessica Urzua

Labor, education, inequality, mobility, social policy.

Jacob Waggoner

Political and economic inequality in America, focusing on property and the administrative state.

Julius Wilson

Government institutions.

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.