Announcing the 2026 Stone Scholars and Wiener Scholars

Harvard's Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy has awarded ten fellowships to a new cohort of Stone PhD Scholars and Wiener PhD Scholars.

Stone Scholar Francisca Afantchao Biakou (Sociology & Social Policy) is a PhD student in sociology and social policy, and a Presidential Scholar at Harvard University. Using theory, historical, and quantitative methods, she locates reproductive and domestic labor in larger social processes like racialization and nation-making.

Stone Scholar Eliana Buckner (Health Policy) graduated from Northwestern University in 2021 with a BA in Economics. Her undergraduate honors thesis examined the impact of Medicaid Managed Care health insurance plan mergers on plan quality and market concentration. After graduating, Eliana worked as a Senior Research Assistant at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. Her research interests are all things health insurance, from examining access and affordability of medical care at the household level, to firm competition and market dynamics. In her free time, she enjoys reading, hiking, and cooking elaborate recipes for friends.

Wiener Scholar Audrey Feldman (Public Policy) is a PhD student in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School on the Judgement and Decision-Making track. She works on questions of civic health using behavioral and experimental methods. As a research fellow at The People Lab, she collaborates with state and local governments to generate rigorous evidence and implement field experiments that fight inequality. As a graduate researcher at the Fandom and Social Connection Initiative, she studies tools to improve well-being. Audrey holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Notre Dame. She has previously done research in education and international development. 

Stone Scholar Marysol Fernández Harvey (Government & Social Policy) is a PhD student in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University. Her research examines organizing and collective action as means for building durable civic power. She is particularly interested in how locally embedded, broadly networked grassroots organizations translate diffuse grievances into collective political power and condition how governments respond to the adverse effects of rising economic inequality and wealth concentration. In ongoing research, she explores how grassroots, organized civic power can rebuild redistributive coalitions from below by transforming economic discontent into durable electoral coalitions. Marysol is also an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies and the Institute of Quantitative Social Science. Prior to beginning graduate school, Marysol worked as a Research and Organizing Fellow at the Horizons Project, where she supported peacebuilders, organizers, activists, and civic leaders working to advance a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy. She also worked as a Consultant at TCC Group, partnering with philanthropic leaders and community-based organizations to strengthen funding and capacity-building infrastructure for organizations pursuing lasting systems change. Her research questions are deeply informed by this practitioner experience. Marysol was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and has strong ties to New York City. She received her B.A. in Economics and Comparative Literature from Brown University and was named a Truman Scholar in 2020.

Wiener Scholar Nicholas Forster-Benson (Sociology & Social Policy) investigates how various economic institutions exacerbate and mitigate inequality, with a particular focus on housing.

Stone Scholar Alexandra Gibbons (Sociology) is a PhD student in Sociology. She uses demographic and computational methods to examine the relationship between incarceration and inequality in the United States. She is particularly interested in variation within categories often analyzed as internally homogeneous, such as conventional demographic groupings and the classifications used to describe events and outcomes in official records.

Stone Scholar Zehua Li (Government & Social Policy) is a PhD student in Government and Social Policy. He studies American politics, with a focus on political discourse in local politics as well as how it affects education and housing policy. Zehua holds a B.S. in computer science with highest distinction from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Stone Scholar Guy Lichtinger (Economics) is a PhD student in economics at Harvard University whose research lies at the intersection of labor economics, public economics, and the economics of AI. Currently, Guy is most interested in the effects of AI on labor market outcomes and inequality. Prior to Harvard, Guy earned an MA in Economics and a BA in Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics (PPE) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Stone Scholar Maria Luisa Zeta (Education) is a PhD student in Education Policy studying inequality in educational opportunity. Her research focuses on post-secondary access, persistence and returns for low-income students and underrepresented minorities, and on how policy can narrow persistent gaps. Before her PhD, she worked at Innovations for Poverty Action, where she contributed to the design and implementation of large-scale experimental studies on education programs across Latin America. She also held roles at the Peruvian Ministry of Education and the Inter-American Development Bank. She holds a Master of Public Affairs from Princeton University and a BA in Economics from Colby College.

Stone Scholar Austin Zheng (Economics) is a third-year PhD student in the Harvard economics department. His research interests include inequality, intergenerational mobility, and housing markets.