The Russell Sage Foundation is pleased to welcome the class of 2025-26 visiting scholars (listed below), along with Margaret Olivia Sage (MOS) scholar Paula McClain and visiting researchers Edwin Amenta, Adam Berinsky, Jennifer Eberhardt, Ingrid Ellen, Colleen Heflin, Judith Levine, and Francesca Polletta.

While in residence at RSF in New York City, the 17 scholars will pursue research and writing projects that reflect the foundation’s commitment to strengthening the social sciences and conducting research for the “improvement of social and living conditions in the United States.” Among the research topics of the multi-disciplinary group of scholars are projects exploring how racial and ethnic identification change among multiracial individuals over time; how algorithms that classify people, such as the FICO credit score and Equivant’s COMPAS recidivism risk scoring algorithm, shape individual behavior and social outcomes; factors that influenced states to reduce their prison populations in the first decade of the 21st century; why the U.S. has historically resisted a broad-based national consumption tax, such as a value-added tax (VAT), and what that resistance reveals about inequality; how people of color respond to and understand popular media narratives about demographic changes, particularly the “majority-minority” shift, in which people of color are predicted to become the numerical majority; the complexities of the fast-growing U.S. home care labor market; the psychological causes for why children and adults maintain and perpetuate racial segregation; and the life experiences of vulnerable Asian Americans, including disadvantaged refugee groups and low-income older Asians.

The 17 visiting scholars for 2025-26 are:

Mary Campbell (Texas A&M University)
Michael Campbell (University of Denver)
Orly Clergé (University of California, Davis) 
Christina Cross (Harvard University)
Arianne Eason (University of California, Berkeley)
Seth K. Goldman (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University)
Ajay Mehrotra (Northwestern University and American Bar Foundation)
Ruth Milkman (Graduate Center, City University of New York)
Francesc Ortega (Queens College, City University of New York)
John Patty (Emory University)
Elizabeth Penn (Emory University)
Wendy Roth (University of Pennsylvania)
Heather Schoenfeld (Boston University)
Karen Ivette Tejada-Peña (University of Hartford)
Van Tran (Graduate Center, City University of New York)
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field (University of Minnesota)