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Dina Okamoto
University of California, Davis
Visiting Scholar
2004 to 2005
Dina Okamoto, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, will work on a book examining how residential and occupational segregation have facilitated the formation of a common identity among U.S. immigrants from different Asian countries.
Dina Okamoto
Indiana University
Visiting Scholar
2017 to 2018
Okamoto and Linda Tropp will explore immigrant-native relations based on a telephone survey of 2,000 residents of Atlanta and Philadelphia and in-depth interviews with 250 of the survey respondents.
J. Eric Oliver
University of Chicago
Visiting Scholar
2002 to 2003
J. Eric Oliver, associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, will write a book on the impact of multiracial segregation on American democracy. New waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America are forcing the United States to contend with the competing claims of a range of racial and ethnic groups. Yet even as the nation moves toward this multiracial plurality, most racial and ethnic groups continue to lead highly segregated lives.
Melvin L. Oliver
University of California, Santa Barbara
Visiting Scholar
1995 to 1996
Melvin L. Oliver, professor of policy studies at the School of Public Policy and Social Research, University of California, Los Angeles spent a brief period at the Foundation analyzing data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality prior to taking up a new post at the Ford Foundation. His primary interest is to understand the reasons for the sharp increases in both well-to-do blacks and those living in poverty.
Karl-Dieter Opp
University of Leipzig
Visiting Scholar
1996 to 1997
Karl-Dieter Opp, professor of sociology at the University of Leipzig, drafted several chapters of a book that he is writing with Steven Finkel of the University of Virginia in which they will set forth a dynamic theory of collective political action--the conditions under which protest behavior either escalates or diminishes. They will test their propositions using two sets of data, a study of collective political action in West Germany and surveys taken of citizens of Leipzig, the city where protests against the East German communist regime began.
Michael Oppenheimer
Princeton University
Visiting Scholar
2005 to 2006
Michael Oppenheimer, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University, will write a book on how science affects public policy. He will discuss how non-governmental organizations mediate between scientists and policy-makers, and how this process shapes policy on technical issues. The book will focus on climate change, and how non-governmental organizations helped popularize a system of tradable pollution permits as a way to control acid rain and greenhouse gases
Philip Oreopoulos
University of Toronto
Visiting Scholar
2018 to 2019
Oreopolous will evaluate behavioral interventions designed to increase academic achievement among low-performing students at postsecondary institutions. He will synthesize results from four years of field experiments to identify which students struggle in college, what specific challenges they face, and whether technological aids such as online goal-setting exercises, text message reminders, or electronic calendars can generate meaningful and scalable programs to boost academic success.
Ann Orloff
Northwestern University
Visiting Scholar
2006 to 2007
Ann Orloff, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, will write a book examining the relationship between the welfare reform movement and changing beliefs about the role of women in families and the economy. She will examine the ways in which American public policy shows little regard for full-time caregivers and the consequences of the contemporary “employment for all” attitude on women’s welfare.
Working Paper
Francesc Ortega
City University of New York
Visiting Scholar
2025 to 2026
Ortega will examine how recent reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program have impacted disadvantaged communities in flood-prone areas. He will also analyze administrative data on flood insurance policies and the American Community Survey to evaluate additional reforms, such as extending insurance mandates.
Paul Osterman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Visiting Scholar
2014 to 2015
Osterman will examine strategies for improving job quality in the low-wage labor market through encouraging employers to improve their human resource policies. In order to aid the development of policies that lead to better wages and benefits in the private sector, he will analyze the conditions that incentivize firms to improve their employment practices. He will focus on the health care and manufacturing industries.
Julia Cathleen Ott
The New School
Visiting Scholar
2009 to 2010
Julia Cathleen Ott, assistant professor in the history of capitalism at Eugene Lang College and the Graduate Faculty of the New School University, will write a book on the origins of the concept of “democratic investing” in America from 1890-1932.
Elaine Pagels
Princeton University
Visiting Scholar
2006 to 2007
Elaine Pagels, Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University, will write a book that will place the New Testament Book of Revelation in its first century historical context and explore its enduring cultural influence. She will examine how the early Christian movement in Rome was an early example of a conscious effort to separate religion and politics, a phenomenon which, she argues, has been extremely rare throughout all but our most recent cultural history.
Thomas R. Palfrey
California Institute of Technology
Visiting Scholar
2014 to 2015
Palfrey will write a book on Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE) and its applications to the social sciences. Developed by Palfrey and Richard McKelvey, QRE is a game theory concept that is now one of the leading approaches to modeling bounded rationality—the idea that individuals’ rationality is limited by the information they have—in games.
Elizabeth Levy Paluck
Princeton University
Visiting Scholar
2011 to 2012
Paluck will analyze how social norms and behaviors are transmitted among high school students in the United States. Paluck studies settings where prejudice and conflict seem intractable and seeks to understand how such "cultures" of harassment develop. She will examine which students in a social network are most effective at spreading tolerance among their peers, how they do so, and how long their influence in the network lasts.
David K. Park
George Washington University
Visiting Scholar
2009 to 2010
David K. Park, assistant professor of political science at George Washington University, will advance a study examining how the electoral map of U.S. presidential elections shifted (in the years from 1876 to 2000) from red to blue among states along the coasts and from blue to red among states in the South and Midwest. Park will investigate possible causes for these reversals, including the distribution of wealth and inequality between the states, changes in political parties’ ideologies, changes in voter priorities, and the urban/rural divide.
Kyeyoung Park
University of California, Los Angeles
Visiting Scholar
1997 to 1998
Kyeyoung Park, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, explored ethnic and racial attitudes in Los Angeles in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King verdict and subsequent uprising. Her ethnographic work drew on a history of rapid economic and population shifts which created direct competition among ethnic groups for jobs, housing, and access to educational and health institutions.
Lisa Sun-Hee Park
University of California, Santa Barbara
Visiting Scholar
2019 to 2020
Park will study medical deportations, or the involuntary removal of chronically ill or severely injured immigrants to other nations to avoid the burden of health care costs. Using qualitative interviews and policy analysis, she will analyze the historical and social contexts of this little-known practice and explore its implications for public health and immigration policy. She will also study how immigration advocates and the health care providers and administrators of hospitals and clinics that serve large numbers of low-income immigrant patients have responded to this phenomenon.
R. Jisung Park
University of Pennsylvania
Visiting Scholar
2024 to 2025
Park (with collaborator Anna Stansbury) will investigate the extent to which the availability and quality of workers’ outside labor market options affect their health and safety in the workplace. Using data from approximately 15 million workers’ compensation claims from California workplaces, Park finds that better outside-occupation options are associated with reductions in the workplace injury rate.
Virginia L. Parks
University of Chicago
Visiting Scholar
2008 to 2009
Virginia L. Parks, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and Dorian T. Warren, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, will study grassroots community resistance to “big box” retail stores in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.