The Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy has awarded ten fellowships to a new cohort of Stone PhD Scholars conducting research on inequality across disciplines at Harvard.
Marco M. Aviña (Government & Social Policy) studies how diversity, inequality, and exclusion shape political behavior. Topics he is currently working on include immigration and housing. More broadly, Marco is interested in public opinion, survey methodology, and metascience.
Sima Biondi (Government) studies comparative political economy and political development, with a particular focus on colonialism and historical state-building in Europe and the Middle East. Before starting graduate school, Sima worked as a researcher for the University of Chicago’s Law and Economics group. She earned a Bachelor’s with honors in Political Science as well as a minor in Mathematical and Computational Sciences at Stanford University.
Fiona Chen (Business Economics) is a 3rd year PhD student in the Business Economics program, focused on labor, public, and behavioral economics. She is studying the way that labor market institutions and policies shape economic inequality.
Madison Coots (Public Policy) is interested in algorithmic fairness and the use of computational methods to drive reform and increase equity across a diverse set of contexts, including criminal justice, lending, and healthcare. Prior to starting her Ph.D., Madison worked as a data scientist in the Stanford Computational Policy Lab. She holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Management Science and Engineering, both from Stanford University.
Melissa Hernández Jasso (Sociology) is a doctoral student in Sociology and a Fulbright-García Robles scholar. Her research interests lie at the intersection of international migration, higher education, and social stratification, drawing primarily on qualitative methods. In particular, she focuses on the migration of Mexican professionals and how their assimilation pathways are shaped by legal status and educational attainment. Originally from Mexico City, she received her B.A. in International Relations from The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and has collaborated at various research institutions in Mexico and Canada. Prior to her graduate studies, she served at the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was a research consultant at Article 19 Office for Mexico and Latin America. In 2023, she was awarded the Best Undergraduate Thesis recognition by the Center for Research on North America, UNAM.
Kiran Misra (Government) is a Ph.D. student in the American Politics subfield of Harvard’s Department of Government. Her substantive research interests include criminalization and the carceral state, disability, and race and immigration. Prior to starting her Ph.D., Kiran worked as an investigative journalist and as a consultant for the United Nations. She received both her Master’s and Bachelor’s in Public Policy with honors from the University of Chicago.
Brein Mosely (Education) is an Education PhD student at Harvard University interested in the intersection of the U.S.’s education and criminal justice systems. Specifically, she plans to explore how redlining and other historical disparite policy choices have shaped minorities' relationships with these systems. Additionally, she is interested in the development of QuantCrit methodology. At Harvard, she is Graduate Research Assistant at the Hutchins Center Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety. In addition to the Stone Program, she is a PIER fellow for the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard. Before her PhD, Brein completed both her BS and MS in Statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Siri Neerchal (Sociology & Social Policy) is a doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy. Their research interests include intersecting inequalities in work, labor, and health (with a particular focus on LGBTQ and gender-diverse populations), drawing primarily on quantitative and survey-based methods. Specifically, Siri is studying the impact of gender (non)conformity on achievement in elite occupations. Born and raised in Maryland, Siri attended the University of Maryland as a Banneker/Key Scholar and received a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in History. Prior to starting graduate school at Harvard, they worked as a Research Fellow at Stanford Law School. Siri is currently a Graduate Student Researcher on the Shift Project at Harvard Kennedy School.
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman (Public Policy) is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Kennedy School studying public policy and economics. She is a doctoral fellow for the National Science Foundation, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Center and the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality & Social Policy. Her research aims to identify and intervene on patterns of discrimination in workplace and academic settings. In 2022, she published a critically acclaimed collection, The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System, which is the first trade publication to exclusively feature Black scholars and experts across economics, education, health, climate, criminal justice, and technology. In 2019, she co-founded the viral and award-winning digital campaign #BlackBirdersWeek. The year prior she also co-founded The Sadie Collective, the first non-profit organization to address the underrepresentation of Black women in economics, finance, and policy. To date, she remains the youngest recipient for a CEDAW Women's Rights Award by the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women— previously awarded to Vice President Kamala Harris and former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In 2023, she achieved the distinction of being chosen for the inaugural Forbes 30 under 30 cohort in Boston. Her writing and commentary on public policy and higher education is featured widely by media outlets such as TIME, Bloomberg, NPR, and The New York Times.
Shivram Viswanathan (Political Economy & Government) is a PhD student in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University, where his research focuses on the intersections of political economy, innovation, creativity, economic development, and the structure of organizations over time and space. Prior to his studies, he was a Luce Scholar in South Korea and Taiwan, as well as a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He obtained an undergraduate degree in Economics and Mathematics from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Shivram also enjoys cooking and making music, of all varieties.