# Announcing the 2025 Stone PhD Scholars August 01, 2025 The Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy has awarded nine fellowships to a new cohort of Stone PhD Scholars conducting research on inequality across disciplines at Harvard. [**Brianna Alderman (Economics)**](https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/people/brianna-alderman) is a 3rd year Economics PhD student, and a Theodore H. Ashford Fellow at Harvard University. She is from Gainesville, Florida, and graduated in May of 2023 with a B.A. in Economics, B.S. in Mathematics, and B.S. in Statistics from the University of Florida. Her current field interests include labor economics, political economy, and economic history. Broadly speaking, she is interested in looking at how institutions, policies, and public perceptions have hindered Black economic progress within the United States. [**Nadia Bell (Health Policy)**](https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/people/nadia-bell) is a PhD student in the Methods for Policy Research track of the Health Policy program. Her research interests are in improving evidence based policymaking practices in health policy and ensuring vulnerable populations have dignified experiences with the social safety net and behavioral health services. Before starting her PhD, she was a statistical analyst at Mathematica Policy Research and received her BA in Statistics from University of California, Berkeley. [**Mary Soledad Craig (Government & Social Policy)**](https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/people/mary-craig) is a PhD student in Government and Social Policy. She studies American Race and Ethnic Politics, with an interest in how inequality affects local and urban policy-making, in particular, education policy. Prior to joining Harvard, Mary earned a BA in Political Science with a concentration in Philosophy from Columbia University. [**Jesus De Luna (Psychology)**](https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/people/jesus-de-luna) is a PhD student in the Psychology Department. He is studying the psychological mechanisms that shape how people perceive and respond to economic inequality and wealth redistribution. His research focuses on attitudes toward the poor and the rich, with a particular interest in understanding how to affirm human dignity across lines of social and economic class. [**Kseniya Dzhala (Sociology & Social Policy)**](https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/people/kseniya-dzhala) is a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy. Her research uses qualitative methods to examine the contentious politics of rental housing, with particular attention to how landlord and tenant groups mobilize, interact, and negotiate governance. She hopes her research can improve the effectiveness of rental housing policy in order to reduce widespread housing insecurity in the United States. [**Jostin Kitmang (Education)**](https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/people/jostin-kitmang) studies how educational policies, including public universities and financial aid interventions, can serve as vehicles for social mobility for low-income students and their families and increase diversity at the top end of the income distribution. Before joining Harvard, he served as Research Manager at J-PAL LAC, where he led a tutoring initiative aimed at accelerating student learning in the Dominican Republic. He also has experience designing and evaluating nationwide education policies for the Peruvian government and participating in several studies on education and poverty. He holds a BA in Economics from the Universidad de Piura in Peru. [**Dan Ma (Public Policy)**](https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/people/dan-ma) is a first-generation college graduate with a research agenda focused on improving the lives of individuals in marginalized communities who face systemic inequities. Prior to beginning his PhD in Public Policy at Harvard, Dan completed his undergraduate coursework in Economics at UC Berkeley and subsequently worked for Professor Will Dobbie and Professor Crystal Yang as a Predoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. [**Dylan Nguyen (Sociology & Social Policy)**](https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/people/dylan-nguyen) is a doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy. Broadly interested in spatial inequality, their research seeks to understand how relationships between race and place shape people’s opportunity structures. [**Benjamin Waldman (Government)**](https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/people/benjamin-waldman) is a PhD candidate in Government at Harvard University. He studies American political development, focusing on the growth of the administrative state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using archival methods, network analysis, and machine learning, his work places state-building experiments in comparative and transnational perspective. Benjamin graduated from Yale University with majors in political science and mathematics and from the University of Cambridge with a master’s in American history. Before starting his PhD, Benjamin researched presidential emergency powers at the Brennan Center for Justice. See also:- [ Doctoral Fellows ](/news-focus/students) - [ Awards ](/news-focus/awards-0) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)