Angie M. Bautista-Chavez is a doctoral student in the Department of Government and a Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard University. Angie’s research focuses on the domestic and foreign politics of immigration regulation and control. She received her B.A. in Political Science and Policy Studies from Rice University in 2013. In addition to research, she is currently the Teaching Fellow for Survey Research Methods. Angie is also Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow.

Monica was born and raised in Anderson, South Carolina. She received a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology from Furman University, an M.Sc. in Equality Studies from University College Dublin in Ireland, and a J.D. from the Yale Law School.

Before coming to Harvard, Monica was an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, where her primary focuses were D.C. public assistance policy and family law reform. Prior to working at Legal Aid, Monica served as a law clerk for a federal district judge. In a previous life, Monica worked on local, state, and presidential campaigns in South Carolina.

Monica’s primary research interests are spaces where criminal justice and family law and policy intersect, particularly in the context of urban and rural disadvantage.

Jimmy Biblarz is a doctoral student in Sociology & Social Policy. Originally from Los Angeles, Jimmy is a 2014 graduate of Harvard College (Social Studies and English) and the resident LGBTQ tutor in Eliot House. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Jimmy is interested in links between equity-focused public policies, features of neighborhoods and schools, and children’s chances of upward intergenerational mobility. His current project traces the rise and fall of racial integration as the ideological focus of social policy, and the subsequent emergence of competing ideologies. More generally, he is interested in stratification and inequality including discrimination processes, urban poverty, race, immigration, social networks, and continuity and change in values and attitudes.

Jacob earned his BA in Political Science from Emory University in 2012 and an MSc in Urban Studies from the London School of Economics in 2013. At Emory and LSE, Jacob devoted his studies to racial divides, and how these conflicts influence political participation and translate into inequitable policy. As a Ph.D. candidate, he plans to build on these research experiences to study intergroup conflict’s effect on voting behavior, local elections, and urban infrastructure projects. The American electorate’s growing diversity increases intergroup conflict’s salience, and Jacob is interested to explore how demographic change transforms our understanding of social cleavages. 

Brielle Bryan is a doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy. She graduated from Vanderbilt University with a triple major in Sociology, Communication Studies, and Theatre and completed a Master’s of Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy in 2012. Her master’s thesis examined the relationship between childhood welfare receipt and career and financial expectations in early adulthood.

Prior to coming to Harvard, Bryan worked as a research associate at the Urban Institute on the Welfare Rules Database and as a research assistant at the Foundation Center, a nonprofit that collects data on US foundation grant-making.  

Her research interests include poverty, incarceration, youth, social mobility, educational inequality, and neighborhoods.  Her current research investigates the implications of mass incarceration for children and families in the US.

Jack Cao is a PhD candidate in social psychology. His research begins with the premise that underlying inequalities -- whether in employment, education, or criminal justice -- are beliefs about the social groups that differ and why such differences exist. What are the cognitive mechanisms that result in these beliefs? When are why are some beliefs impervious to new and relevant information? And how might these beliefs be updated to better reflect reality?

To address these and related questions, Jack conducts large-scale behavioral experiments that draw on theory and methods from implicit social cognition and Bayesian computational modeling. This work is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Before beginning graduate school, Jack received a BA in psychology and government from Cornell University and taught high school science in New Orleans, LA through Teach For America.

Ashley Craig is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Economics, specializing in public and labor economics. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Sydney in 2009. Before coming to Harvard, he worked as an economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia and as a research assistant at the University of Sydney. The research issues that he is most passionate about relate to inequality and discrimination, including policies that can be used to counter them. His current work focuses on inequality by race, gender and income in the context of education.