Maria Abascal,
BA Sociology, Columbia University. Maria’s broad interests include political sociology and immigration. Her previous research includes a study of Cuban-American party identification and a comparative study of city council meetings in two Florida cities with vastly different levels of immigration.

Sarah Brayne,
Sarah received her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia where she majored in Sociology. Her research interests include social stratification, criminal justice policy, poverty, race, and urban sociology. As an undergraduate, she researched police policy reform in New York City and as a graduate student is interested in investigating the effects of other public policy shifts on urban poor populations.

Angèle Christin,
BA Sociology (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris). MA Social Sciences (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2006). Angèle has been working in France on culture and criminal justice. Her Master's thesis, an ethnography of a criminal procedure in a Parisian courthouse, has been turned into a book: Comparutions immédiates. Enquête sur une pratique judiciaire (La Découverte, 2008). Angele's interests include culture, law, social movements, health, comparative sociology, ethnography.

Alexander Davis,
B.S. in Sociology and Psychology, James Madison University. Alex’s research interests include culture, organizations, consumption, gender, and sexualities. His previous research has examined gender actualization on reality makeover shows, the use of fashion to mobilize multiple and dynamic gender performances, and consumption habits in a suburban shopping mall.

Elizabeth S Derickson,
BA Psychology and Public Policy (Swarthmore College). Her research interests include urban and suburban sociology, inequality, social policy, socio-spatial relations, and culture. Her work includes studies of neighborhood gentrification in New York City, suburban affordable housing development, the social organization of urban small business, and the culture of play in city parks.

René Flores,
B.A. Interdisciplinary Studies (University of California-Berkeley). While at Berkeley, René conducted a study on the transformation of the Salvadorean oligarchy from plantation owners into financial tycoons following the country's civil war. For his senior thesis, he explored the anti-immigration sentiment in North Eastern Pennsylvania by conducting fieldwork on several communities that passed anti-immigrant ordinances. His research interests include immigration, race and ethnicity, and contemporary international political economy. Before coming to Princeton, he was a research assistant at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. René is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Denia Garcia,
B.A. Sociology and Psychology (Northwestern University). Denia's interests include race/ethnicity, culture and non-profit and ethnic organizations. Her previous research was a qualitative study of status differentiation among youth in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Before starting her graduate studies at Princeton, Denia worked at a non-profit legal assistance agency in Chicago.

Sergio Galaz García,
BA Political Science and International Relations (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City). Sergio’s senior thesis use statistical methods to explore the dynamics of conflict between informal economies and the local government in Mexico City. Prior to entering graduate school, Sergio worked to introduce Budgeting for Results techniques as an internal consultant in the Mexico City Government. His interests include sociology of culture, sociology of space, and political sociology.

Lauren Gaydosh,
Lauren received her B.A. in Sociology and Women's Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Lauren most recently worked for Poverty Action Lab on randomized interventions focusing on health and economics in Zambia. She also worked on various health related research projects in Malawi and conducted independent research on HIV discordant couples. Lauren's interests are in the social determinants of health, and the intersection of health, family and gender in the context of development.

Kerstin Gentsch received her B.A. in Economics and Linguistics & Language from Swarthmore College in 2005. At Princeton she is pursuing a joint degree in Sociology and Demography. Her research interests are in immigration, education, and sociology of language. Before coming to Princeton, she worked as a research assistant at Urban Institute. She is co author of a paper on the financial well-being and economic integration of immigrant groups in vulnerable urban neighborhoods.

Jennifer Huynh,
B.A. Sociology (University of California, Berkeley), M.A. Anthropology (University of Bristol). Jennifer's general interests include immigration, ethnography, and race/ethnicity. Her previous research included work in central/southern Vietnam with racial minorities and in the United Kingdom with first and second generation Somali immigrants. Before joining Princeton, she worked as a sociology instructor in northeast China.

Erin Johnston,
B.A. Sociology, Psychology (Rutgers University). Erin's interests include social psychology, new religious and social movement organizations and sociology of culture, cognition and knowledge. Prior to coming to Princeton, Erin worked for a non-profit providing employment services to individuals with disabilities.

Joanne Wang Golann,
B.A. English, Amherst College (2004). M.A. Social Sciences, University of Chicago (2006). Joanne's research interests include social inequality, higher education, and family. She has worked as a senior research assistant at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, and as an English teaching assistant in Taiwan under the Fulbright program. Her past research has focused on community colleges, the high school to college transition, and undocumented day laborers.

Sarah Kaiksow,
BA Sociology and Women's Studies (U. of Wisconsin-Madison), MSt Legal Research (Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford, Balliol College), MA Arab Studies (Georgetown). Areas of interest include gender, law and society (American and Islamic), race/ethnicity in the U.S., the postcolonial state, and comparative research.

Kathryn Li,
B.A. Sociology (Rice University). Kati is a first-year graduate student in sociology. Her interests are in health, race, inequality, and religion. At Rice, Kati researched the effects of acculturation and ethnicity on Asian-American health behaviors.

Tina Lee,
B.A. Sociology (Wellesley College). As an undergraduate, Tina's senior thesis was a study of the rhetoric used by the Chinese state in its campaign against the Falun Gong; an excerpt from which was awarded the May Ling Soong Foundation Essay Prize. Her research interests include social stratification, economic and cultural sociology, religion, and knowledge. Before coming to Princeton, she worked as the bureau manager of The New York Times in Shanghai. Tina is a recipient of the Edna V. Moffett Fellowship.

Karen Levy,
B.A. with High Distinction in Political Science, Indiana University (2003); J.D., magna cum laude, Indiana University School of Law (2006). Karen's research interests include sociology of law, space and place, architecture and design, social control, and sociology of culture. Her previous research experience includes work on constitutional models of gender equality and the implementation of federal antidiscrimination law. Before her studies at Princeton, Karen served as a law clerk to Judge Sarah Evans Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. Karen is a licensed attorney and is admitted to the state and federal bars of Indiana.

Rourke L O'Brien,
BA Social Studies, Harvard University. Rourke's interests include poverty, domestic and comparative social welfare policy, and wealth inequality. Prior to his arrival at Princeton, Rourke served as a Policy Analyst with the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington where he continues to serve as a nonresident research fellow. His ongoing research includes analyzing the impact of welfare eligibility policy on the savings behavior of the poor. Rourke is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Karen Muth,
Karen graduated with a B.A. in Sociology and International Studies from Northwestern University in 2007. She spent the next year teaching English in Russia followed by a year doing research on the families of labor migrants in Armenia. Her interests include international migration, the former USSR, and social networks.

Manish Nag graduated with an A.B. (1997) in Computer Science from Brown University. He followed this with 12 years in the software industry as a consultant and entrepreneur. Manish's sociological interests include social networks, globalization, space/place, labor markets, gender, and organizations. As a research assistant at Harvard, Manish devised a method for visualizing network data in geographic space, the output of which will be included in an upcoming AJS article on the social structure of the world polity. Manish is the creator of Sonoma, a software tool for creating geospatial visualizations of social network data.

David Pedulla,

David graduated from Boston College in 2004 with a degree in History. His research interests include low-wage work, social stratification, economic sociology, and inequality. Prior to starting his graduate studies, David worked on issues of economic justice and protecting the rights of low-income communities as a research associate at the Brennan Center for Justice. As a Congressional Hunger Fellow, he was involved with efforts to expand access to key work supports, such as the Food Stamp Program. David also served as a New York City Urban Fellow where he worked to launch the city’s Center for Economic Opportunity, an innovative social policy initiative to reduce the number of people living in poverty in New York City. For more information, you can visit his webpage at: http://www.davidpedulla.com.

David Reinecke,
B.A. and M.A. in History and Sociology of Science (University of Pennsylvania). David’s research interests include science studies, information technologies, economic sociology, and the sociology of culture. His past work has examined the challenge of open-source hardware, how to conduct a laptop orchestra, and the market for vintage music equipment. He recently co-taught a class at Penn on the history of science fiction—nerdy perhaps, but oh so fun... Website: http://www.princeton.edu/~reinecke/David_Reinecke/Welcome.html

Victoria Reyes,
BA International Studies, BA Psychology, The Ohio State University. Victoria’s interests include power, globalization, and interracial intimacies/encounters. Prior to coming to Princeton, she conducted research in the Philippines as a 2006-2007 Fulbright Fellow, and worked as an education associate at a reproductive health non-profit in Washington DC. Victoria is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

Allison Youatt Schnable,
B.A. Social Relations and Political Theory, Michigan State University; M.A. Social Sciences, University of Chicago. Allison's general areas of interest include religion, collective identity, international development, and politics. Her master's thesis examined the political implications of a California megachurch's humanitarian programs. Before coming to Princeton, Allison served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal and worked on an environmental education project in the Baltimore Public Schools. Most recently she was a Presidential Management Fellow with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she was the Administration for Children and Families' lead for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in six Midwestern states.

Lauren G Senesac,
B.A. Sociology and Computer Science (Furman University). Lauren's research interests include technology, culture, networks, and organizations. Her past research has included such diverse topics as neutralization techniques in fairy tales, needs of lower income residents in a neighborhood center, and the relationship between online game design and emergent norms.

Brad Smith,
Since completing an undergraduate business degree (B.A., Baylor University) Brad has traveled domestically and abroad as a management consultant, survived and enjoyed life in the investment banking industry, earned a master’s degree in religion (M.Div., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary), and directed a leadership studies program at Rice University. Reflecting this array of academic and professional experiences, his research interests include the sociology of: culture, morality, economic phenomena, and religion.

Kyla Thomas,
B.A. Sociology and Communication Studies (University of California, Los Angeles). Kyla’s research interests include the sociology of culture, economic sociology, creativity, and innovation. While at UCLA, she examined the increasing “corporatization” of Broadway musical theater and its impact on levels of innovation, creative success, and creative diversity in the industry.

Erik Vickstrom,
Erik Vickstrom graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in Sociology and American Studies. After working at the Murray Research Center at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, he spent almost five years living and working in West Africa. He served as a Peace Corps English teacher in Guinea and then worked in Senegal as Assistant Director of an NGO devoted to cross-cultural training and resource development. After returning to the US, Erik worked on the USAID funded Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) project in Washington, DC. Erik's interests include international migration and development, inequality, social networks, and West Africa.

Jessica Yiu,
B.A. and M.A. Sociology (University of Toronto). Jessica's broad interests include race/ethnicity and immigration, particularly the integration of second-generation immigrants. Her previous research included measuring levels of transnational activity across immigrant generations and examining the child-rearing strategies of immigrant families and communities. She intends to pursue research on the early childhood outcomes of immigrant children.

Sofya Aptekar,
B.A. in Sociology, Yale. Sofya's main areas of interest include culture, migration, and stratification and inequality. She has successfully completed the demography sequence at Office of Population Research. Sofya is currently working on her dissertation, which is a mixed methods examination of tensions in the social construction of nationhood at the critical juncture of citizenship acquisition by foreigners. She also studies immigrant organizations in Edison, New Jersey, and migration from the Baltic countries to Ireland. Before coming to Princeton, Sofya taught first grade in Austin, Texas.

Yael Berda,
Yael received her LLB in Law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and wrote her masters thesis in Tel Aviv University's Sociology and Anthropology department on the military bureaucracy in the occupied territories, an institutional ethnography of the permit regime in the west bank from 2000 - 2006 (Forthcoming, 2010, Van Leer institute and Hakibutz hameuhad publishing ). Formerly a Human rights lawyer, Yael's research focuses on bureaucratic and administrative legacies, the relationship between state bureaucracies and human rights, colonial influences on modalities of organization in post colonies, state violence and collective memory. She is particularly interested on how administrative structures persist and transform following regime change in states. She is also interested in historical comparative sociology, urban sociology, sociology of law, sociology of culture and social theory. Yael was happy to take part in the SSRC's pre dissertation fellowship on state violence. Before she came to Princeton she was a lawyer and ran political campaigns. You can read more about her at LAPA.

Devra Jaffe-Berkowitz,
B.A. University of Pennsylvania, M.A. Rice University (Sociology of Religion)

Michael O. Benediktsson,
B.A. Wesleyan University (American Studies). Mike's interests are in urban sociology, political sociology and the sociology of culture. Past research projects include a study of the media coverage of major white collar crimes and an examination of political rhetoric and cognition surrounding suburban diversity. Mike's current project focuses on conceptions of morality, social heterogeneity and the suburban built environment.

Before beginning his studies at Princeton, Mike worked as a journalist and spent several years in the press office of Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors Without Borders. When he is not busy pondering the great questions of our time, Mike enjoys rooting for the New York Mets and standing in frigid water trying to fool trout. Both are losing propositions.

Bart Bonikowski,
B.A. Queen's University (Canada); M.A. Duke University. Bart's research focuses on the development of methodological and theoretical tools for understanding temporal and spatial variation in attitudinal meaning structures.  His dissertation uses inductive survey analysis methods to identify commonly-held representations of the state and nation among respondents from thirty countries.  The project examines the institutional sources of change in the composition and distribution of these representations, as well as the consequences of their relative prevalence for the ability of nationalist social movements to mobilize public support.  Bart's other research projects have examined the generation of risk-based social classification schemata by state surveillance practices, ecological niche competition among musical genres, and the impact of trade networks on cross-national attitudinal similarity.  He has also co authored papers on labor market inequality, the remunerative effects of Internet use, and voluntary associations.

Phillip Connor,
B.A Acadia University (Canada); MDiv Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary; M.A. McGill University. Phillip has worked on a number of research projects as a research manager of a non-profit prior to beginning his graduate study at Princeton, including an online immigrant database system and a new church study. Phillip's primary interests surround immigration and religion. Using immigrant cohort datasets from the United States, Western Europe, Quebec, Canada, and Australia, Phillip’s dissertation, entitled Disruption, Assimilation, and Facilitation, seeks to develop and test a general theory of immigrant religious adaptation. For more information on Phillip Connor, please visit his webpage at www.phillipconnor.com.

Nick Ehrmann,
received his BA in American Studies and History from Northwestern University in 2000.  While working as a Teach For America corps member in Washington D.C. for two years, Nick founded "I Have A Dream" -Project 312.  Project 312 (www.project312.org) is a long-term youth development organization that empowers thirty of his elementary students to achieve while providing a guaranteed opportunity for higher education.  At Princeton, Nick works from within sociology, OPR, and the Woodrow Wilson School on issues of inequality, urban sociology, poverty, and public policy.  He can be reached at ehrmann@princeton.edu.

Elaine Enriquez,
Elaine graduated with a B.A. in Religious Studies from the university of Arizona in 2001, followed by two years in Kazakhstan, two years working in business, then two years studying for a Masters in Russian (University of Arizona, 2007). Areas of sociological interest include economics, specifically informal economies, political sociology of the state, and punishment. She is currently conducting research on prison economies as well as state capacity in developing countries.

Rachael-Heath Ferguson,
B.A. Sociology, Columbia University. Rachael's research interests include ethnography, inequality, culture, social networks, and urban sociology. Her current focus is on the structure and interactions of networked groups in the informal economy, notions of durable inequality, and the formation of social capital in disenfranchised populations. Previously, Rachael studied Philosophy and Theology at the University of Durham (England) and worked for several years as a Wall Street equities trader.

Julia Gelatt,
B.A. Sociology/Anthropology (Carleton College). Julia's research interests include immigration, immigrant assimilation, inequality, demography, and gender. Before coming to Princeton, Julia worked at the Migration Policy Institute, researching trends in immigration and labor force growth, the second generation across US communities, and shifts in federal policies related to immigrant assimilation. Julia is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

James Gibbon,
BA Wheaton College. James' main interests include religion, migration and the Near East, with special emphasis on the role of Islam in modern Turkey and the experiences of Muslim immigrants in the U.S. Before attending Princeton, James spent three years in Istanbul, initially working as the finance manager for a disaster relief project and later teaching English as a foreign language.

Alice Goffman
Alice Goffman is interested in ethnography, race, the city, and social interaction. Her current project looks at the impact of the prison boom on the daily lives of a group of poor young men in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Her next project will be a study of middle class domestic interaction, with a focus on hosts and guests.

Amir Goldberg,
B.A Computer Science and Film & Television (Tel Aviv University), M.A. Sociology (Goldsmiths College, University of London). Amir is interested in the intersection of technology and culture, and the ways in which our so-called 'network age' is reflected in organizational changes and patterns of work, leisure and urban development. His M.A. thesis explored the emerging iPod culture using the concepts of complexity theory. Prior to joining Princeton, Amir worked, amongst other things, as a telecoms consultant, a software programmer, and a writer for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz.

Sara Nephew Hassani,
B.A. Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. Sara's interests include communications, economic sociology, and the sociology of law. Her present work deals with issues related to Internet accessibility as well as with political struggles around new information technologies. She is also interested in environmental sociology and has been collaborating with three other students on a project that explores the way ranching communities in the American West have been affected by and deal with coalbed methane extraction, strip mining, and oil drilling.

Becky Hsu,
B.A. Sociology, Yale University. Becky’s interests include theory, economic sociology, culture, Chinese society, religion, and organizations. Her dissertation examines the effect of moral understandings on the economy, drawing upon unusual ethnographic data on microcredit programs in rural China. For her dissertation work, she has won four student paper awards from the American Sociological Association (Sections on Asia and Asian America, Theory, Sociological Practice and Public Sociology) and the Eastern Sociological Society. She has published papers on international religion, faith-based social services, religion and economic development, and has two forthcoming articles on microcredit.

Kenneth Jamison,
B.A. English Literature (Washington University in St. Louis). Kenneth's research interests include sociology of culture, race, mass media and regional sociology, with a focus on the influence of U.S. popular culture in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Prior to attending Princeton, Kenneth spent two and a half years in Taipei, Taiwan, studying Chinese at Chung Hua University and Japanese at Eikan Language School. During that time, he also trained teachers and taught English as a foreign language.

Pierre Antoine Kremp,
BA, Economics, MA Social Sciences, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. Pierre graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure in 2004, after completing his master's thesis on the diffusion of stock ownership in France. His main research interests include economic sociology, inequality and sociology of culture.

Jeffrey Lane,
B.A. in Sociology, Wesleyan University (2001). Jeffrey's research interests include race, social stratification, ethnography, criminality and deviance, and popular culture and imagery. Jeffrey is the author of Under the Boards: The Cultural Revolution in Basketball (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), an exploration of race, culture, and individualism in professional and college men's basketball over the last thirty years. In 2002, Jeffrey founded Schoolhouse Tutors, a mentorship and tutoring program for middle school and high school students in his hometown of NYC.

Carol Ann MacGregor is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology and a fellow of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. Her work focuses on religion, education, families and organizations. Her dissertation is examines the closure of Catholic schools. The dissertation is one specific empirical examination of her larger interest in social reproduction. In other projects she has looked at children’s religious cultural objects, both historical and contemporary.  Another line of research looks at mothers who return to school and the human and cultural capital implications for their children. She holds a MA in Sociology from McGill University and a BA in Political Studies and History from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario). 

Emily Marshall,
B.A. in Mathematics and Russian Studies, Pomona College. Emily is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and the Office of Population Research.  Her interests include political sociology, fertility, economic sociology, culture, and social networks.  Her dissertation integrates these interests in a study of family policy in low-fertility countries in Europe.

Alexandra K. Murphy

B.A. Urban Studies, Columbia University. Alexandra's research interests include ethnography and micro sociology, urban sociology, inequality, race and ethnicity, culture, and socio-spatial relations. Before coming to Princeton Alexandra conducted research on the indoor sex trade in New York City, the transformation of public housing in Chicago, and informal economies in New York and Chicago. While at Princeton her research has focused on suburban poverty, including research on urban and suburban differences in organizational capacity and the symbolic dilemmas of suburban poverty for nonprofit antipoverty organizations.  She is currently working on her dissertation, which is an ethnographic community study of the social organization of suburban poverty. Alexandra is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research has also been supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Hauser Center for Nonprofits (Harvard University).

Petra Nahmias,
BSc Environmental Science, University of London. MA Demography, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Petra's research interests lie in social demography, particularly fertility, reproductive health, and maternal and child health. She is especially interested in the intersection of the effect of ethnicity, religion and race on fertility such as the effect of ethnicity on demographic behavior in Africa and the sociology of maternal mortality and morbidity.

Jayanti Owens,
B.A. Swarthmore College (Political Science, Sociology, and Educational Studies). Jayanti is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research at Princeton University. Her interests include stratification, education, and immigration. Before coming to Princeton, Jayanti was a research assistant in the Education Policy Center of The Urban Institute. Her past research has focused on the achievement gap in higher education performance between by race and immigrant generation, particularly examining psycho-social explanations for academic underperformance. Jayanti is a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Michelle Phelps,

Michelle received her B.A. in Social Psychology from U.C. Berkeley in 2005. While attending U.C. Berkeley, Michelle interned at the Wiley Manual Courthouse in the pre-trial services department, tutored inmates at San Quentin State Prison, and worked for one year at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, where she authored a paper on the prison and parole systems in California for women. After leaving U.C. Berkeley, Michelle spent two years at the Center for Court Innovation in New York City, writing grant applications and assisting senior staff in developing new project ideas. She was also a math tutor at the Fortune Society. Since coming to Princeton, Michelle has begun work on several projects related to prisons in the US and interned with the New York Correctional Association, a prison monitoring and advocacy group. Michelle is affiliated with the Office of Population Research's demography training program and is part of the joint degree program in Social Policy. Michelle is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship.

LiErin Probasco,
B.A., Sociology/Anthropology, Swarthmore College. LiErin's research interests include organizations, inequality, culture, race/ethnicity, gender, and religion. Before attending Princeton, she worked at the Community Development Institute in East Palo Alto, CA, doing community-grounded research.

Amy Reynolds,
AB, 1999, Harvard University. Interests include religion, economic development, globalization, and statistics. Before attending Princeton, Amy taught at a charter school in DC and worked in El Salvador on coffee and fair trade issues.

Alejandro Rivas, Jr.,
B.A. Human Biology (Health Policy), Stanford University, 2006. M.A. Sociology (Stratification and Inequality), Stanford University, 2006. Alex plans on studying immigration, in particular how both governmental and non-governmental institutions and organizations and their policies facilitate or hinder immigrants' ability to make the most of the resources America has to offer (education, health care, employment, housing, justice). In list form, he would probably say his interests are "immigration, social policy, mobility, demography, poverty, stratification, inequality, race and ethnicity, and making lists." Alex is a vegetarian, opened for The Who once (sort of), co-founded the Stanford University chapter of the Mexican Youth Durkheim Society (membership of 2), and when he grows up, he would like to be a sociology professor or an investment banker, whichever his doctoral work best prepares him for.

Rania Salem,
BA Political Sciences (American University in Cairo), MSc Sociology (University of Oxford). Rania's interests include sociology of marriage and the family, gender, and migration. Before attending Princeton, Rania worked at the Cairo office of the Population Council, where she carried out research on youth transitions from school to work, and evaluated an intervention for disadvantaged adolescents.

Michael Schlossman,
B.A. Anthropology and Sociology, Amherst College. M.Phil, Criminology, University of Cambridge.  Michael’s interests include race, crime, and the criminal justice system and his research focuses on understanding discretionary decision-making and discrimination in the juvenile justice system.  His previous work examined this issue from a historical perspective, utilizing qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze how Mexican Americans in Los Angeles were punished during the Great Depression.  His current research seeks to expand our understanding of how the juvenile justice system responded to increasing youth violence rates and the politicization of youth crime in the 1990s.

Daniel Schneider,
A.B. Brown University (Public Policy). Daniel's interests include social demography, economic sociology, and social policy. He is particularly interested in the role of economic factors in family formation. His current work takes a close look at the "marriage bar," examining the association between asset ownership and marriage. Prior to coming to Princeton, he worked for several years as Research Associate at Harvard Business School. Daniel is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

Hana Shepherd,
B.A. Stanford University (Humanities: Culture & Politics), M.A. Stanford University (Sociology). Hana is primarily interested in the mechanisms involved in the maintenance of group-based inequalities, including cognitive and cultural processes, social networks and complex systems, and organizations. She has done work on racial attitudes and new methods to analyze attitudes generally, racial discrimination, the dynamics of tags on websites, how perception is shaped by networks in a vegetarian co-op, the practice of categorizing countries by the World Bank, and theories of culture.  Her dissertation uses data from the Council on Foreign Relations archives and quantitative methods to explore the dynamics of how groups create and legitimate formal knowledge.

Lori D. Smith,
B.A. Indiana University 2005. Lori's interests include development, political economy, organizations, and political sociology. More specifically she is interested in how organizational and institutional theories may be used to understand economic performance and interactions between macroeconomic and microeconomic processes, and to account for variation in organizational arrangements and practices. Her next project will explore the "supply-side" of democratization cross-nationally.

Mahesh Somashekhar,
B.S. Engineering Management Systems, Columbia, 2005.  Mahesh studies political sociology, organizations, culture, and community, but he is interested in all parts of sociology.  He has done work that analyzes the evolution of social networks among the Freemasons of Washington D.C., which he is continuing to pursue throughout his graduate career.  Before coming to Princeton, he worked as a research assistant at the Urban Institute, studying the expense and compensation patterns of American foundations.  He also served as a research assistant in sociology, anthropology, political science, and demography as an undergraduate.

Liza Steele,
Dual-degree program at Columbia University - B.A. in Political Science and Master of International Affairs with a double concentration in Human Rights and International Security Policy. Liza's research interests include the construction of morality and changing values under different systems of social stratification, particularly in Asia and Latin America, focusing on China and Brazil. She has a working knowledge of Chinese (Mandarin), Portuguese, French, and Spanish. The subfields in which she has specialized include the sociology of religion, the sociology of culture, political sociology, urban sociology, and stratification. Liza has published on the issue of terrorism in Xinjiang, China's predominantly Muslim region. She draws on mixed methodologies in her research. Present working papers include "The Pursuit of Happiness in China: Capitalism, National Pride, and the Decline of Subjective Well-Being," which uses quantitative methodology to examine the three independent waves of the World Values Survey carried out in China; and, "'A Gift from God': Poverty, Religion, and Adolescent Motherhood in Urban Brazil," which draws on ethnographic work she conducted in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, including over 50 face-to-face interviews. Before coming to Princeton, Liza was the project manager for over 30 primary research projects on media use throughout Southeast Asia, and spent a year interning at the United Nations - at the Central Asia desk of the Department of Political Affairs in the Secretariat in New York, and in Bangkok, Thailand at the United Nations Development Programme's Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific.

Naomi Sugie,
Naomi's research interests concern crime and punishment, inequality, and demography. At Princeton, she is pursuing two areas of work: the first investigates the consequences of incarceration for families and communities of offenders. Specifically, she is researching the relationship between paternal incarceration and subsequent social welfare receipt by families of ex-felons. The second looks at social and economic factors related to the recent increase in criminal offending by the elderly in Japan. Before beginning her graduate studies, she worked at the Vera Institute of Justice on child welfare, policing, and jail reentry issues and she is co-author of a book profiling working mothers living in New York City shelters. Naomi is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

LaTonya Trotter,
LaTonya received her BA from Williams College and her MPH from the University of Washington. Her areas of interest span the substantive fields of social demography, ethnography, and sociology of medicine. A continuing line of research is to understand the intersection of race, geography, and aging. LaTonya is currently undertaking research to explore a different aspect of health and medical care: the health professions. She hopes to explore the interplay between professional identity, professional conflict, and community institutions.

Monica Trujillo,
B.A. Sociology (University of Pennsylvania). Monica's broad interests include education, immigration, race and ethnicity, inequality, and stratification. Her previous research has looked at the effects of bilingual students on public schools in California and how high achieving minority students differ from the less achieving at elite universities.

Craig Barton Upright,
B.A. Saint Olaf College, Mathematics and English Literature. (Organizational and Cultural Sociology) Craig came to Princeton with ten-plus years of experience in the restaurant industry, including 4 years as the co-owner of a small cafe in Saint Paul that held punk rock concerts in the basement every weekend. His dissertation explores the development and transformation of the Organic Food industry in the United States from 1970 to 2002, as a product has progressed from alternative to mainstream markets. Culminating in the adoption of the first National Organic Standards, its primary focus is the changing definition of the term "organic" in agricultural, political, and cultural realms of society.

Charles Varner,
A.B., Harvard University. Charles is interested in patterns of social stratification and inequality. He studies the effects of racial and ethnic heterogeneity on both individual attitudes and broader social policy outcomes. He is also interested in organizational and economic sociology.

Scott Leon Washington,
B.A. University of California, Berkeley (Sociology and Philosophy). Interests: Race and Ethnicity; Social Classification; Social Stratification; State Formation and State Information; Science; Culture; Epistemology; Education; Politics; Violence; Social Psychology; Historiography; Comparative Methods; Extreme Systems of Social Control, Confinement, and Supervision; Migration and Development; Classical and Contemporary Social and Sociological Theory.

Kevin Woodson,
B.A., Political Science (Columbia University); J.D. (Yale Law School). Kevin's interests include legal sociology, gentrification, the American civil rights movement, American socio-economic stratification, the black middle-class, and urban poverty. Prior to coming to Princeton, Kevin worked for three years as a corporate litigator in Washington, D.C.

Sharon Yoon,
B.A. Senior Fellow and Asian Studies, Dartmouth College. Sharon is interested in understanding racial identity construction of marginalized groups in East Asia. At Dartmouth, she was able to attend several study abroad programs in China and Japan to learn the language and culture. For her Senior Fellowship, she conducted an ethnographic study of Korean minorities in Japan and Chinese minorities in Korea. Before coming to Princeton, she spent a year consulting for an educational firm in Seoul.

Cristobal Young,
BA in Economics and Sociology (U. Victoria), MA in Economics (UVic). Cristobal's main interests lie in economic sociology, information theory, and the sociology of economics. His MA thesis was titled The Emergence of Sociology from Political Economy in the US: 1880-1940. This paper shows how economics departments sponsored the entrance of sociology into the university system, and seeks to explain the breakdown of collaboration between the two disciplines. His essay in the Socio-Economic Review focuses on the mathematical reformation of economics (circa 1930-1950), and its socialist political origins. In the world of broader theory, Cristobal is interested in the dynamics of information, drawing on the work of Erving Goffman (impression management), Thorstein Veblen (status rivalry), and George Akerlof (the market for lemons).