Named a Johns Hopkins University Gilman Scholar, distinction that honors and celebrates select Johns Hopkins faculty who embody the highest standards of scholarship and research across the university, 2018.

Winner of the Andrew Carnegie fellowship, awarded by the Carnegie Corporation of  New York for the advancement of research in the humanities and social sciences, 2016.

Weaver is at work on a new project that will map patterns of citizenship and governance across cities and neighborhoods called the Faces of American Democracy using an innovative technology that creates digital ‘wormholes’ called Portals.

Vesla Weaver's book with Amy Lerman, Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, documents the effects of increasing punishment and surveillance in America on democratic inclusion, particularly for the black urban poor. University of Chicago Press (2014).

Winner of the American Political Science Association's Best Book in Urban Politics, 2015.

Founding director, ISPS Center for the Study of Inequality, Yale University, 2015-2017.

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Vesla M. Weaver, and Traci R. Burch's (PhD '07) book, Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America, has been published by Princeton University Press (2012).

Winner of  the American Political Science Association’s Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Best Dissertation Award, 2008.