STUDENTS

Social Policy Ph.D. students, 2007-2008

Ph.D. students in Social Policy pursue either the Ph.D. in Political Science & Social Policy (Government track) or the Ph.D. in Sociology & Social Policy (Sociology track). The degree field for each student is indicated in parentheses below.

P r o f i l e s

Deirdre Bloome (Sociology & Social Policy, G2)
Deirdre Bloome is a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy and a research fellow with the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a BA in Sociology with Honors. After working for two years a consultant, advising on issues of corporate finance, she entered Princeton University, where she obtained a Certificate in Demography from the Office of Population Research. Deirdre's research interests include income and wealth inequality, intergenerational mobility, poverty, and statistical demography. Her previous work has focused on the life course of at-risk children and teens, the effects of income inequality on children’s developmental environments, and the demographic and economic contributions to rising family income inequality in the U.S.

Jesse Bradford (Sociology & Social Policy, G6)
Jesse grew up in Spokane and Chicago and attended Princeton University, where he earned an A.B. in History in 1997. Upon graduating, he took a position as a management consultant with Marakon Associates. In his two and a half years with Marakon, Jesse worked with consulting teams to help client companies develop and implement shareholder value maximizing strategies. After leaving Marakon – and taking a much needed six month break to travel and study in Argentina – Jesse decided to apply some of the skills that he had developed as a management consultant to other ventures and, in 2000, helped start two new companies. The first of these – Responsible World – was created to promote socially responsible corporate-community involvement. The second – Potomac Consulting Group – advises pharmaceutical companies on issues of product and portfolio strategy. Having deferred his academic ambitions for several years to pursue opportunities in business, Jesse is now excited to continue his studies at Harvard. Jesse’s research interests include the relationship between collective memory and identity, and social policies designed to address historical inequities.

Anmol Chaddha (Sociology & Social Policy, G2)
Anmol Chaddha earned a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002. He has worked at several policy institutes in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, doing research to support grassroots organizing and policy development around issues of racial and economic justice. In his policy career, he worked to establish living wage laws, increase local minimum wage levels, expand workers' access to health care, and improve the quality of jobs in low-wage industries. Anmol has also examined the impact of post-9/11 national security policies on immigrant communities, and he has conducted research on the structure of informal work in New York City. His academic interests include low-wage work, immigrant workers, and the politics of race and economic development in American cities.

Jacqueline Chattopadhyay (Government & Social Policy, G3)
Jacqueline received her B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of California, Irvine in 2005. She is interested in the intersection of public policy, media content, and public opinion in the U.S., particularly in the area of health politics and policy. Her dissertation research will focus on individual-level opinions of U.S. health insurance schemes. Her other academic interests include welfare state expansion and retrenchment, racial and ethnic inequality, and the politics of U.S. food and drug policy. She has interned for California elected officials, the National Education Association, and the Center for American Progress think tank. Whenever able to escape from work, she enjoys dancing, running, and exploring unfamiliar cities on foot.

Victor Chen (Sociology & Social Policy, G5)
Victor studies poverty, development, globalization, and social movements. With Katherine S. Newman he co-authored The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (Beacon Press, 2007), which explores an invisible population -- the near poor -- who are far more numerous than those living below the poverty line. He also contributed to the book Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market (Russell Sage and Harvard University Press, 2006). Victor is the founding editor of INTHEFRAY Magazine, an award-winning publication that seeks to question, inform, and inspire conservations about identity and community. His writing has appeared in Newsday, the Minority Law Journal, The Oregonian, The Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Daily News, and Let's Go: Chile.

Porsha Cropper (Government & Social Policy, G2)
Porsha graduated from Stanford University in 2005 where she majored in Political Science and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her senior thesis analyzed the psychological and political determinants of African American
perceptions of racial group threat from Latinos in Los Angeles and Compton. Since graduation, Porsha worked as a research assistant in the Metropolitan Policy and Economic Studies division of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. She has worked on several projects ranging from policy proposals on the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to issues focusing on antipoverty policies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit in urban
communities. She also worked with Dr. Alice Rivlin on her new upcoming book on the crisis of rising health care expenditures and the politics of Medicare. Currently, Porsha’s research interests focus on the ways in which the socio-economic and political contexts of neighborhoods create and/or prevent opportunities for conflict and coalition building among different racial and ethnic groups in multiethnic cities and suburban areas. Outside of school,
Porsha’s hobbies include dancing, shopping, and watching the food network.

Nicole Deterding (Sociology & Social Policy, G1)
Nicole Deterding grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and attended Wellesley College, where she earned a B.A. in Sociology in 2003. After graduation, she moved to Washington, DC, where she worked for four years as a Research Assistant and Associate at The Urban Institute and completed a Master's degree in Education Policy Studies at The George Washington University. During her time at Urban, Nicole worked on several multi-site, mixed methods program evaluations of education interventions, in both K-12 and higher education settings. Topics she has studied include underrepresented minorities in math, science and engineering; institutional change processes in higher education; and the educational segregation of limited English proficient students. Her current research interests lie in stratification, social mobility, and policies that aim to mediate educational inequality. Outside of academics, Nicole enjoys exploring the city, reading novels, and cooking an occasional elaborate meal.

Michael Fortner (Government & Social Policy, G7)
Michael Javen Fortner received his BA in Political Science and African-American studies from Emory University in 2001. Currently, Michael is a PhD Student in the Government Department at Harvard University and a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy. His work studies the intersection of American political development and political philosophy -- particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and class. His dissertation, “Must Difference Divide?: The Institutional Roots of Racial Politics,” compares the development of racial politics in London and New York. Marshalling historical evidence and over-time data on non-white associations, his project examines the relationship between state structures and patterns of non-white political activism. In fall 2005, Michael was a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics. He has been awarded fellowships or grants from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Center for American Political Studies, the American Political Science Association, and the Mortar Board Honor Society. He has also received a Certificate of Distinction for Excellence in Teaching and has been a nominee for the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize.

Katie Gan (Sociology & Social Policy, G5)
Katie graduated for Trinity University in sunny San Antonio with a BA in sociology and public policy economics. Having spent all of her life in Texas, she's at Harvard now for a change of pace and climate (she has since regretted the change in climate). Katie's had a few brief forays into the world outside academia: most notably working with the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington and helping to open a trio of restaurants in Dallas. Her current foci include labor market inequalities, gender and the work/family balance, and research methods. Katie's most recent work analyzes expectations for labor force attachment and subsequent investments human capital. She also has a project analyzing the latest Boston Jewish community survey. Katie is rarely found in the wild, but in urban areas can be identified by the yoga mat slung across her back and her eternal search for decent Tex-Mex.

Benjamin Goodrich (Government & Social Policy, G5)
Ben Goodrich graduated from Emory University in 2001 with a master's degree in political science and a bachelor's degree in political science and economics (just for fun, he finished the requirements for a philosophy major as well). Since college, he has worked at the Institute for International Economics, which is a well-respected "think tank" in Washington D.C. that researches international economic policy. While in Washington, Ben made a name for himself by analyzing the steel industry in the United States and also researched the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. In graduate school, Ben plans to study the ways in which developed countries adjust to globalization and in particular, how governments meet the needs of workers whose job security is threatened by globalization. In addition, he is interested in multilateral economic institutions and quantitative methodology. Ben grew up in Dallas and spends too much of his spare time following Dallas' professional sports teams. He will always be a fan of '80s rock music. For more information about Ben, see his webpage: www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~goodrich/

Sara Sternberg Greene (Sociology & Social Policy, G1)
Sara graduated from Yale University in 2002 with a B.A. in Political Science. While at Yale Sara worked at the New Haven Housing Authority, where she helped to create a tenant council in a public housing project and researched outcomes for Section 8 and public housing residents. Sara also worked with parents and children involved in the child welfare system and conducted research on the relationship between welfare reform and child abuse and neglect cases. Sara entered Yale Law School in 2002 where she was an Articles Editor of the Yale Law and Policy Review and a Notes Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She also worked in the Housing and Community Development Clinic, representing a non-profit organization in a fair housing case and advising community organizations on development issues. In law school, Sara studied alternative courts that sentence individuals to community and social service programs rather than to prison terms. After graduating from law school in 2005, Sara clerked for a Seventh Circuit federal appellate judge in Chicago. She then moved to Massachusetts where she practiced affordable housing law before coming to Harvard. Sara’s academic interests include inequality, urban neighborhoods, single mothers, crime and deviance, and law and sociology.

Sarah Halpern-Meekin (Sociology & Social Policy, G4)
Sarah's research interests focus on family structure, adolescence, and marriage/divorce. Her dissertation examines the intergenerational transmission of understandings of marriage/divorce and relationship skills for adolescents. Additionally, her dissertation will offer a preliminary look at the impact on teens of exposure to relationship-skills and marriage promotion curricula in high schools.

Michael Henderson (Government & Social Policy, G2)
Mike Henderson graduated with honors in 2001 from Louisiana State University, where he earned a BA in Political Science and a BS in Animal, Dairy and Poultry Science, which he followed with a MA in Political Science in 2003. He then joined Teach for America and served for two years as a special education teacher in a low income community. During this time he had the privilege of teaching the most amazing group of children in the world. He has spent the last year conducting research in education policy for the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana. His current research interest is school reform that expands educational opportunity. Though he may be sixteen hundred miles from home, Mike continues to cheer on his beloved Fightin’ Tigers of LSU as loudly and obnoxiously as ever. He spends the rest of his spare time daydreaming about home-cooked south Louisiana gumbo.

Jason Lakin (Government & Social Policy, G5)
Jason Lakin graduated from Brown University in 1998 with a BA in History. He then spent several years in Washington, DC where he co-authored a book on comparative democracy with Seymour Martin Lipset, The Democratic Century. After a brief stint as a policy analyst for the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Jason traveled to Chile on a Fulbright. He is currently working on social policy in developing contexts, and has recently written on health reform in Mexico and antipoverty policy in India.

Katherine Levine (Government & Social Policy, G1)
Katie received her B.A. in Political Science from Yale University in June 2007. Her senior thesis compared the political culture and institutional factors shaping the ability of business leaders to exert power in economic development decisions in Milwaukee and Minneapolis, and examined what types of policies emerged in both cities as a consequence of these power relations. Outside her academic coursework, Katie worked as a research assistant for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development examining city-suburb polarization, regional job growth, and neighborhood poverty. In addition, she conducted research for the New Haven Housing Authority exploring how changes in Section 8 income limits would affect voucher recipients. Katie’s current research interests include American political development, urban politics and poverty, comparative US-European politics, and power relations and the process of coalition building.

Byron Miller Pacheco (Government & Social Policy, G4)
Byron Miller Pacheco graduated with honors in government and history from Hamilton College in 2002. As an undergraduate, he did fieldwork in South Africa looking at historical roots of political preferences among "coloureds" on a NSEP Boren Scholarship. He also presented research on white attitudes in racially diverse areas at the 2001 APSA Annual Meeting through the Bunche Institute. Byron entered Harvard as an APSA Minority Fellow and has continued his interest in race and politics, recently completing an ethnographic study of political involvement at a historically black church. His primary research, however, focuses broadly on immigration policy and law. His dissertation will document and explain the paradoxical and contradictory ways that American state and local governments react to illegal immigration.

Ryan Moore (Government & Social Policy, G6)
Ryan T. Moore studies American social policy and statistical methods. In particular, he is working on the interaction between direct democracy and redistribution through pensions, interstate antipoverty policy variation, federalism, methods for the design of policy experiments, and causal inference from quantitative data. Ryan received a B.A. from Yale in Political Science and Mathematics, and an A.M. from Harvard in Statistics. He spent several years before graduate school teaching high school mathematics, and also contributed to the Welfare Reform and Beyond project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.
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Bikila Ochoa (Sociology & Social Policy, G8)
Bikila received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2000. While at Penn he majored in African-American Studies and Sociology, with a concentration in Urban Sociology. Presently, he is a seventh-year student in the joint Ph.D. program in Sociology and Social Policy. His research interests include qualitative methods, racial attitudes and politics, masculinity, social stratification, and crime. Currently, Bikila is working on a ethnographic research project in which he seeks to understand how jail inmates are prepared, and prepare themselves, for life in the wider society. Bikila plans on continuing this work for his dissertation.

Ann Owens (Sociology & Social Policy, G3)
Ann Owens received her BA in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2004. Ann worked at the Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work at the University of Chicago before beginning the Sociology and Social Policy program at Harvard. Her academic interests center around education and the family, and her qualifying paper examines neighborhood effects  on adolescents' aspirations and expectations for the future. She has written on such topics as Hispanic education, the educational consequences of adolescents' experiences of stereotyping in the classroom, how working families spend time at home, how family structure affects child outcomes, and the transition from adolescence to adulthood with respect to educational and occupational goal attainment.

Melanie Penny (Sociology & Social Policy, G5)
Melanie Rose Penny hails from Compton, CA, and has arrived at Harvard after spending five years on the Stanford University farm. She received her bachelor's degree in Political Science in 2002, and spent most of 2003 working as a research assistant in Stanford's Departments of Communication and Psychology, studying a wide range of race-related issues. Her senior thesis dealt with the effect of the news media on the creation of criminal justice policy and the resultant disproportionate confinement of African-American youth. Melanie's many research interests revolve around the issue of perception and the way in which popular perceptions can significantly influence the content of social acts. Currently, she is studying how perceptions of one's neighborhood may affect the quality of life experienced within various neighborhood contexts. Although she is most frequently consumed by the weight of pressing social issues, in her lighter moments, Ms. Penny enjoys partaking of the comedic stylings and social commentary of Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy (the early years).

Sanjay Pinto (Sociology & Social Policy, G3)
Sanjay is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and Social Policy. His research interests include labor market inequality, the political economy of development, and racial and gender discrimination. He is currently conducting research on flexible/non-standard employment in Europe, with a focus on its implications for low-wage workers. Sanjay's past work experience includes time spent as a magazine reporter, a union researcher, and a political canvasser. He received a BA in Sociology from Amherst College, and a Master's in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. Sanjay enjoys running, yoga, dancing, spicy food, and engaging in collective action for good causes.

Cassi L. Pittman (Sociology & Social Policy, G3)
Cassi L. Pittman, a native of Cleveland, OH, is a third year graduate student in the Sociology department. She recently received her B.A. in Sociology and Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. As her graduate career progresses she looks forward to engaging in international comparative research on issues of racial inequality. Experiences studying and conducting research on residential patterns and racial residential integration in Cape Town, South Africa and on racial and cultural identity in Havana, Cuba have incited her curiosity in cross-national work. More broadly her interests lie in studying issues of racial inequality, stratification, race and ethnic relations, and social and racial identity development.

Brenna Marea Powell (Government & Social Policy, G4)
Brenna Marea Powell received her A.B. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, with a minor in Political Science, from Stanford in 1999. Her undergraduate work focused on race and public policy in the US, and after graduation she worked with the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation with grassroots peacebuilding projects in
Northern Ireland. She is interested in comparative racial politics, transitions from violent conflict to politics, and in understanding the conditions under which ethnic and racial stratification improves. Her dissertation project investigates the role of state institutions in the attenuation of ethnoracial hierarchy across a variety of settings including the United States, Ireland, and Brazil.

Maria Rendón (Sociology & Social Policy, G7)
Maria was born and raised in south Los Angeles, California. She is a graduate from the University of California, Irvine (2001) where she received a BA in
Sociology and another in Political Science. After enduring five long winters in Cambridge, Maria has returned to sunny Los Angeles where she is currently conducting her dissertation. Maria's study will explore if and how residential context influences school and work outlooks and outcomes for second-generation Mexican Americans during their transition into adulthood. Maria's general research interest include the intersection of immigration and urban poverty, urban neighborhoods and social policy.

Eva Rosen (Sociology & Social Policy, G1)
Eva graduated from Barnard College in 2005 with a BA in Political Science and French and Francophone Studies. Her undergraduate senior research project examined the way in which the French state deals with the cultural and religious differences that arise from the presence of minority and immigrant populations. She has since worked at the Center for Urban Research and Policy at Columbia University, doing research on topics such as Chicago's public housing, gangs, prisoner reentry, and the informal economy. Eva also conducted ethnographic research on sex workers in Chicago, examining sex work as as supplement to or replacement for low-wage labor, as part of strategy to make ends meet. Eva's research interests are rooted in stratification, urban marginality, the working poor, and immigration.

Daniel Schlozman (Government & Social Policy, G5)
Daniel Schlozman received his A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College in 2003, and is now a G-4 in Government and Social Policy. His dissertation asks when political parties and interest groups will
integrate with one another by comparing the entrance into party politics of organized labor into the New Deal Democratic coalition with that of
evangelicals into the Republican Party during the last generation. He has also studied immigrant political incorporation, voter initiatives, and philanthropic foundations. Daniel furthers his political education by dabbling in Massachusetts politics; he is Chair of the Cambridge Ward Eight Democratic Committee and a member of the Massachusetts
Democratic State Committee.  In his spare time, he likes to hike and to eat at obscure ethnic restaurants.

Francis Shen (Government & Social Policy, G7)
Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Francis Shen is a seventh year Ph.D. student in Government and Social Policy, writing a dissertation on the costs of rape and sexual assault. He graduated from Harvard Law School, and is a licensed lawyer in Missouri. Francis is completing a book with Doug Kriner at Boston University on inequality and American war casualties. He has also performed extensive education policy research, and in 2007 co-authored a book, The Education Mayor (Georgetown Press). Francis' research has been quoted in publications such as the New York Times, L.A. Daily News, and Governing Magazine. Outside of academics, Francis competes in the hurdles for the Greater Boston Track Club and annually takes baseball road trips (26 stadiums and counting). For more on his baseball trips, research, and political musings, check out: www.fxshen.com.

Jennifer Sykes-McLaughlin (Sociology & Social Policy, G5)
Jennifer graduated from James Madison College at Michigan State University with a BA in Social Relations and Psychology in 1999. The following two years found her at the University of York in Northern England, where she received her MA in Social Policy and Social Work and developed her interest in comparative social policy. Jennifer’s keen interest in child and family welfare has led her to undertake work relating to foster care, welfare-to-work, child support, child protection, and family independence initiatives. Recently, she has worked in the non-profit sector evaluating Michigan juvenile delinquency prevention initiatives and crime victims’ services. Outside of academia Jen enjoys traveling, photography, birding, and vegetarian cuisine.

Laura Tach (Sociology & Social Policy, G4)
Laura received her B.A. with Honors in Sociology from the Pennsylvania State University, where she also minored in Statistics and African American Studies. Laura has worked at the Racial Statistics Branch of the US Census Bureau evaluating the quality of racial data collected by the decennial census. Most recently, she worked at Abt Associates on a national evaluation of the No Child Left Behind Act. Laura's research interests focus on how public policy can be used to influence the intergenerational transmission of poverty, the relationship between the education system and labor market outcomes, and the well-being of children and families living in poverty. She is currently working on several projects related to these themes, including a HUD-funded examination of a mixed-income housing project in Boston. Outside of sociology, Laura enjoys going to local jazz clubs and watching college football.

Van Tran (Sociology & Social Policy, G4)
Van is currently a PhD Student in the Joint Program in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University. His research focuses on immigrant incorporation (especially the immigrant second generation), intergroup relations, social inequality and urban poverty. He is also a Doctoral Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. At Harvard, he coordinates the Migration and Immigrant Incorporation Workshop, an interdisciplinary platform for
graduate students and faculty members in the Greater Boston area to circulate works-in-progress in order to elicit feedback and suggestions for improving scholarly work. To date, his academic work has been generously supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Paul & Daisy Soros Foundation for New Americans, the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
:: Homepage (www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/gs/Tran_Van)

Scott Winship (Sociology & Social Policy, G8)
Scott is currently living in Washington D.C., writing his dissertation on the effects of single parenthood on child outcomes. He also serves as Senior Policy Advisor for Third Way: A Strategy Center for Progressives. Before joining Third Way, Scott served as the the founding managing editor for The Democratic Strategist, an online political strategy magazine. Since entering graduate school, Scott has co-founded the student-based think tank New Vision, co-authored a policy brief on summer scholarships sponsored by the Center for American Progress, published an article on welfare reform in The American Prospect, and analyzed electoral data for William Galston and Elaine Kamarck's The Politics of Polarization. He has written on welfare reform with his advisor, Christopher Jencks, and on mental ability with Christopher Winship (no relation). Scott received a B.A. from Northwestern University in 1995. Prior to joining the program, he worked as a policy analyst at Ascension Health, a multistate health care system based in St. Louis. In his spare time, Scott enjoys Wes Anderson movies, Texas hold 'em, and obsessing over his dissertation.

K. Miya Woolfalk (Government & Social Policy, G2)
K. Miya Woolfalk received her B.A. in History from Stanford University in 2005. A recipient of the undergraduate Chappell Lougee Fellowship, Woolfalk conducted research in South Africa on anti-Apartheid black protest drama. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Woolfalk published her senior research on mixed-race public opinion in The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal 2005. Before entering graduate school, Woolfalk worked as a research assistant in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University and taught high school level history and civics courses at California Education Plan, School for Independent Learners. Woolfalk is a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellow and an American Political Science Association Minority Fellow. Her primary field of research is American politics and her research interests include social inequality, racial and ethnic politics, political opinion and behavior and political psychology.
:: Webpage (www.gov.harvard.edu/student/woolfalk)