Announcing the 2024 Stone PhD Scholars

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.

Gaby Aboulafia (Health Policy) is a PhD student in the Political Analysis concentration of the Health Policy program. Her research interests are in how politics shape health policy choices and how federalism creates unequal and racialized policy outcomes. In her work as a Stone Scholar, she hopes to examine how health insurance coverage policy contributes to disparities in wealth accumulation.

Aditi Bhowmick (Public Policy) studies barriers to female labor force participation and how social norms interact with economic shocks to perpetuate gender inequality. She was previously working as India Director at Development Data Lab, where she produced research on in-group judicial bias in India, upward mobility in South Asia, excess mortality during Covid-19 and implications of cultural distance on economic opportunity in India. She holds a MPA from Princeton University and a BA in Economics and Political Science from Cornell University. When not trying to make sense of the world through data, she can be found cooking, painting, or on long runs with her husband.

Aidan Connaughton (Government) studies local politics, accountability, civic engagement, and non-voting political behavior. His current research focuses on the attitudes and characteristics of local elites with regard to public comment and public commenters as well as the relationship between political and economic inequality.

Hannah Craig (Sociology) is a doctoral student in Sociology and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research interests include race/ethnicity, incarceration, and the criminalization of the body. Currently, she is studying the association between skin-tone and other physical characteristics and during-incarceration inequality. She is originally from Michigan, and received her B.A. in Political Science and Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Michigan. Before beginning her graduate studies, she worked in health and human services research in the Bay Area, as well as serving as a research assistant for the Institute for Social Research at U-M.

Major Eason (Sociology) is a PhD student in Sociology whose research interest revolve around environmental justice and sustainable development. These interests emerge from a pressing need to create solutions that can work to aid communities facing environmental racism at the local level. Namely, he analyzes how disparities in toxic facility placement manifest at the ground level. Through mutli-level and multi-method scholarship, he broadly examines the question, How is environmental racism manifested differently across place?

Johann D. Gaebler (Statistics) is a Ph.D. student in Statistics whose research develops and applies data science and statistical tools to complex social problems, such as mass incarceration, hiring discrimination, and other issues at the intersection of statistics, computer science, and policy. His work focuses on the measurement of discrimination, computational social science, and algorithmic fairness, as well as causal inference, machine learning, Bayesian statistics, statistical computing.

Zheng Ma (Government & Social Policy) is a PhD student in Social Policy and Government at Harvard University. His research interests lie primarily in leveraging computational methods to understand social phenomena and solve social problems.

Clare Suter (Economics) is a third-year Harvard Ph.D. student in Economics, where she studies inequality and intergenerational mobility using tools from labor and public economics. Prior to graduate school, she was a predoctoral fellow at Opportunity Insights, and received her BA in Public Policy with a minor in Statistics from the University of Chicago.

Jessica Urzua (Sociology & Social Policy) is a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy. She is interested in studying how power and social structure in labor markets affect economic inequality, and how social policies may exacerbate or mitigate this inequality. She received an AB in Social Anthropology from Harvard College and an MA in Economics from Columbia University.

Julius Wilson (Government & Social Policy) is a Ph.D. student in Harvard's Government and Social Policy program. He is interested in how organizations representing low-income and marginalized groups coordinate with one another, interact with the party system, and interface with government institutions to shape social policy. Previously, he worked at Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, primarily on the Obama Presidency Oral History Project. He holds a B.A. from Columbia University in Sociology, with a minor in African-American studies.