Search Fellows
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Gregory Acs
Urban Institute
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Acs will analyze how community-level factors influencing economic well-being, autonomy, and belonging affect income growth at the bottom quintile in those communities. Acs will draw on county-level data from the American Community Survey and the Urban Institute’s Upward Mobility Dashboard to examine the relationship between community characteristics in 2014 and changes in the level of income at the 20th percentile between 2014 and 2023.
Omer Ali
Univeristy of Pittsburgh
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Ali will investigate how the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) mortgage programs shaped residential segregation and racial inequality in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. The research will document where and to whom loans were issued and examine their relationship to racialized patterns of suburbanization and neighborhood formation.
Tony Cheng
Duke University
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Cheng will examine how elite wealth is infused into American policing. He introduces the concept of pseudo-state entities – organizational extensions such as police department foundations and political action committees that enable state actors to engage in otherwise administratively regulated activities. Drawing on interviews and a variety of public records and large datasets from cities across America, Cheng will trace new sources and mechanisms of inequality within the political economy of public safety.
Bo Cowgill
Columbia University
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Cowgill will advance the research agenda on noncompete agreements—clauses that limit workers’ post-employment mobility. Building on a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted with two major employers, Cowgill finds that non-competes reduce mobility and earnings even when unenforceable and are often signed without being noticed—highlighting gaps between legal form and behavioral reality.
Peter Hepburn
Rutgers University–Newark
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Since enactment in 2012, the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program has moved one in every five units of public housing out of the traditional public housing system and into other subsidy streams. While approaches to rental housing assistance in the past several decades have focused on strategies aimed at poverty deconcentration and dispersal, RAD entails place-based investment and attempts to keep communities intact.
Jelani Ince
University of Washington
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Ince will use evidence from a two-year (2018-2020) ethnography of Risen Church, an interracial church in St. Louis, Missouri, to examine why DEI initiatives fail despite explicit commitments to their successful implementation. Ince will use ethnographic, interview, and administrative data to develop a sociological theory of philanthropic capture: a structural condition in which philanthropic organizations tether diversity missions to the preferences of elite donors.
Elizabeth Jacobs
University of Connecticut
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Jacobs will examine skilled migration as a central and growing hallmark of U.S. migration policy. Using LinkedIn employment histories in tandem with longitudinal in-depth interviews, she will analyze how migration policy shapes the spatial and occupational mobility of skilled migrants moving between the United States and India. The project situates student and work visas within the complex maze of the U.S. migration system and articulates an institutional framework for understanding how state and corporate actors regulate and constrain opportunities for migrants and institutions alike.
Christine Jang-Trettien
City University of New York
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Jang-Trettien will examine housing markets in segregated neighborhoods in Baltimore. Using over 400 interviews, she describes the emergence of unregulated markets, probing the institutional actors and real estate practices that become prevalent in such markets. This project builds on the idea of “institutional marginalization” and how it perpetuates disadvantage in segregated communities.
Gabriela Kirk-Werner
Syracuse University
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Kirk-Werner and Stitt will examine the operation and impact of programs that promise alternatives to criminal prosecution and punishment, including court-mandated mental and behavioral health and drug treatment, community service hours, and electronic monitoring. Despite the popularity of such programs, little is known about how they shape criminal legal processes or the daily lives of the millions of people assigned to them every year.
Lisa Levenstein
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Levenstein will work on a book about the little-known fact that during the 1980s and 1990s the U.S. Army built the most successful large-scale example of publicly funded childcare in the nation’s history. Drawing on oral history and archival research, Levenstein will demonstrate how a team of military wives developed the professional skills needed to convince some of the nation’s toughest generals that the Army could not execute its mission without providing high-quality universal childcare.
Rachel Meltzer
Cornell University
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Meltzer will consider the physical and economic transformations in neighborhoods caused by extreme climate events. She will examine the physical disrepair and reinvestment in housing and the ensuing population changes in neighborhoods hit hard by Hurricanes Sandy and Harvey in New York City and Harris County.
Tali Mendelberg
Princeton University
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Mendelberg will study public opinion about affordable housing in the U.S. She will examine the paradox that while many Americans say they want government to improve housing affordability, proposals for affordable housing often encounter public resistance. Using original surveys with novel measures, her early analyses find wide support for affordable housing, but only when it primarily benefits people of low and modest means and does not primarily benefit developers, investors and landlords.
Suzanne Mettler
Cornell University
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Mettler will investigate the place-based components of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act, as well as more recent policy changes affecting rural areas, in order to understand the conditions under which policy changes can mitigate placed-based social and economic inequality and the political polarization that now accompanies it. Given the rural-urban divide, can public policies that target disadvantaged rural places, aiming to promote economic development, generate supportive constituencies that act politically to sustain them?
Ryan Parsons
University of Mississippi
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Parsons will examine the growing role of disability benefit programs—Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI)—within the U.S. social safety net, particularly in rural regions experiencing long-term economic decline. While these programs were originally designed to address health-related work limitations, they have evolved into one of the largest sources of cash assistance for low-income Americans.
Samuel Perry
University of Oklahoma
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Perry will integrate data from over a dozen recent national surveys with a careful reading of Christian nationalist authors to examine how Christian nationalist rhetoric and ideology – a set of beliefs about America’s fundamentally Christian identity and social order – helps perpetuate economic inequality in the United States.
Laurel Smith-Doerr
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Smith-Doerr will conduct an inductive, qualitative study on the power dynamics that shape who benefits from artificial intelligence in the workplace. She will use the U.S. long haul trucking industry as an important case study to examine how truckers encounter and resist narratives which assume that AI can substitute for human decision-making on the job.
Mary Ellen Stitt
Rutgers University
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Kirk-Werner and Stitt will examine the operation and impact of programs that promise alternatives to criminal prosecution and punishment, including court-mandated mental and behavioral health and drug treatment, community service hours, and electronic monitoring. Despite the popularity of such programs, little is known about how they shape criminal legal processes or the daily lives of the millions of people assigned to them every year.
Lauren Valentino
Univeristy of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Valentino will work on a book examining how ordinary Americans define discrimination and why those definitions matter. Drawing on original mixed-methods data, including 40 in-depth interviews and two nationally representative survey experiments, Valentino analyzes how people decide what "counts" as racism, sexism, and classism. Rather than treating disagreement as a matter of individual sensitivity, she identifies patterns in symbolic boundaries around discrimination definitions, and how they are shaped by social location, lived experience, and political orientation.
Caitlin Zaloom
New York University
Visiting Scholar
2026 to 2027
Zaloom will examine how U.S. middle-class families organize their financial lives across generations, from early adulthood through retirement. Using ethnographic interviews and historical research, Zaloom will analyze how families use debt, savings, insurance, and long-term planning in ways that reshape their relationships and obligations. She will work on a book manuscript arguing that financial institutions and public policies depend on intergenerational support while placing moral and behavioral pressures on the families that rely on them.