Monica Bell is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her areas of expertise include criminal justice, welfare law, housing, race and the law, qualitative research methods, and law and sociology. Some of her recent work has been published in The Yale Law Journal, Law & Society Review, Social Service Review, and the Annual Review of Law & Social Science. She has also published work in popular outlets such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Washington Post.
Anna Beshlian is a research assistant at the Columbia Justice Lab’s Square One Project, a multiyear project committed to boldly re-imagining the criminal justice system in order to address underlying issues like poverty and racial inequality. Beshlian is currently a student at Barnard College of Columbia University and a candidate for the Bachelor of Arts in American Studies. In partial fulfillment of the American Studies major, she will be writing a thesis centering on the mechanism of disenfranchisement within the criminal justice system.
Laura M. Bogart, PhD, is a Senior Behavior Scientist at the RAND Corporation. She is a social psychologist with expertise in HIV disparities, including psychosocial factors in HIV prevention and adherence, and development and testing of behavioral HIV interventions. Her primary research impact has been in the areas of stigma and medical mistrust, especially among Black/African Americans and Latinos. She is a Fellow in both the American Psychological Association and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. In 2014, she was awarded the American Psychological Association’s Division 44 (LGBT Psychology) Award for Distinguished Contribution to Ethnic Minority Issues.
Jenifer L. Bratter is a Professor of Sociology at Rice University. She has a PhD in Sociology with an emphasis on Demography from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001. Bratter’s work explores the ways race shapes identity, family relationships, and social well-being within the United States. Current projects focus on indicators of social well-being such as education, poverty, residential segregation, and health. Her work has appeared in the The Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS), Journal of Marriage and the Family, and Ethnicity and Health.
Dr. Robert A. Brown is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice at North Carolina Central University. His research focuses on street-level interactions between police officers and citizens (e.g., citation, arrest, use of force), the influence of race and gender (of officials and offenders) on criminal justice processing, and the impact of intermediate sanctions and problem-solving courts on rehabilitation and criminal justice processing. His scholarly work has been published in Justice Quarterly; The Journal of Criminal Justice; Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management; The Journal of Crime and Justice; The Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice; Criminal Justice Studies; and The Blackwell Companion to Criminology.
Brandon R. Davis holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and a Master’s in Gender and Race Studies from The University of Alabama and a Master of Social Work from Alabama A&M University. Currently he is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Political Theory Project of Brown University. In the fall of 2019 he will begin as an Assistant Professor of Law and Society at the School of Public Affairs and Administration of The University of Kansas.
Kiara W. Douds is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at New York University. Her research interests include diversifying communities, individual beliefs about racial inequality, and contextual factors that shape beliefs about race. Her dissertation investigates how residents of America’s most diverse suburb understand diversity and race and the community dynamics that result from those understandings.
Kerry L. Haynie is associate professor of Political Science and African & African American Studies at Duke University. His research and teaching interests are in race and ethnic politics, intersections of race and gender, legislative processes and state-level institutions. Along with articles in The Journal of Politics; Legislative Studies Quarterly; Politics, Groups, and Identities; the International Journal of Africana Studies; Race and Social Problems; Social Science and Medicine; and the Journal of Women Politics and Policy, his publications include New Race Politics in America: Understanding Minority and Immigrant Voting (2008,co-edited with Jane Junn), African American Legislators in the American States (2001), The Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics, Volume I: African Americans and Asian Americans (2000ss), and The Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics, Volume II: Hispanic Americans and Native Americans (2000).
Molly Higgins-Biddle, MPH is data analyst and database developer at JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc. with ten years of experience in evaluation and public health. She received her MPH in Biostatistics from Boston University School of Public Health and received the Herb Kayne Prize for Excellence in Biostatistics. She currently serves as a director and data analyst for a number of projects related to HIV/AIDS and evaluation. Ms. Higgins-Biddle regularly develops evaluation plans, designs data collection instruments for process monitoring data, builds databases, performs data quality checks, conducts quantitative data analysis using advanced statistical methods, and develops reports.
Susan M. Glisson is the co-founder and partner of Sustainable Equity, LLC. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. She specializes in women’s and African American history, especially in social movements for freedom. She was the founding executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, an internationally acclaimed organization focused on healing and equity. She has numerous publications and is often called upon now as a public intellectual in matters of race. She chairs the Mississippi State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Her work is focused on transformation, truth-telling, community trust-building and justice.
Keneshia Grant is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University in Washington, DC. Her first book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century (Forthcoming, Temple University Press), describes the political impact of the Great Migration on party politics in three cities from 1915-1965. Her research interests include the political consequences of demographic changes in cities and inner-ring suburbs as well as the Return Migration of Black Americans back to the South. Grant earned a Ph.D. in political science and public administration from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Originally from Lauderhill, Florida, Grant is also a proud graduate of Florida A&M University.
Nancy La Vigne is vice president for justice policy at the Urban Institute where she manages a team of researchers and conducts her own criminal justice research on police reform, reentry from prison, and justice technologies. Her work appears in scholarly journals and practitioner publications and has made her a sought-after spokesperson on related subjects. From 2014 to 2016, La Vigne served as executive director for the bipartisan Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections Reform, and she was founding chair of the Crime and Justice Research Alliance. La Vigne holds a BA in government and economics from Smith College, an MA in public affairs from the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in criminal justice from Rutgers University.
Marcus Lee is a PhD student in Political Science at The University of Chicago, with concentrations in American Politics and Political Theory. His research interests include black politics, social movements, gender/sexuality, and collective memory. His dissertation project centers on black gay/lesbian collectivizing in the late-20thcentury and its relationship to genealogies of black politics. He holds a BA in Sociology from Morehouse College.
Christopher Lewis is a Junior Fellow at Harvard University’s Society of Fellows. His research is about how the law should respond to the mechanisms that generate racial, ethnic, and class-based inequality, and seeks to bring the normative and conceptual tools of analytic philosophy to bear on findings in the social sciences in a way that is designed to answer a wide range of questions under this banner. He holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Department of Philosophy.
Alecia McGregor is Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health at Tufts University. She is also affiliated with Africana Studies and the Program in Science, Technology and Society. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2014 where she was a NIH National Institute of Mental Health doctoral trainee. From 2014 to 2016 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University, where she taught courses in Global Health and Health Policy and African American Studies. She has published and lectured internationally on the plight of marginalized communities vis-à-vis access to health care. Her work focuses on the political determinants of health inequalities, health systems, and religion, race and health politics in the United States, Brazil, and across the African Diaspora.
Heather A. O’Connell is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Louisiana State University. She is a graduate from the Sociology Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. O’Connell’s work centers on understanding race and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. She is particularly interested in the role of racial composition and history in shaping places and subsequent inequalities, and has contributed significantly to research on the legacy of slavery and its connections to contemporary Black-White inequality.
Leah Wright Rigueur is an historian at the Harvard Kennedy School. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and is the author of the award-winning book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power. Her research focuses on modern African American history and 20th Century United States political and social history. Her writing and research has been featured in outlets including Federal History, Souls, and the New York Times. Most recently, she held fellowships with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. She is currently working on a book manuscript: Mourning in America: Black Men in a White House, which explores the HUD scandal of the 1980s.
Leah Sakala is a policy associate in the Justice Policy Center, where she produces research and offers strategic assistance to improve public safety and justice policy and practice. Her work includes projects to identify and address the drivers of state prison populations, assess and strengthen reform efforts, and support community-driven strategies to advance safety and justice. Before joining Urban, she was a senior policy analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative, where she led projects to inform justice reform efforts and reduce the wide-ranging collateral consequences of mass incarceration. Sakala holds a BA from Smith College and MPP and MBA degrees from Brandeis University.
Dara Z. Strolovitch is Associate Professor at Princeton University, where she holds appointments in Gender and Sexuality Studies, African American Studies, and the Department of Politics. Her teaching and research focus on interest groups and social movements and on and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in American politics and policy. Her book, Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics, won the American Political Science Association’s Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book on national policy, the APSA’s Leon Epstein Award, the American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, and the Association for Research on Nonprofits and Voluntary Action’s Virginia Hodgkinson Prize. She received her B.A. from Vassar and her Ph.D. from Yale.
Heather Ann Thompson is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian on faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is the author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy as well as Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City, and she writes regularly on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for myriad scholarly publications including the Journal of American History, The Journal of Urban History and Criminology and Public Policy and popular outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic, and Salon. Thompson has served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and has given congressional staff briefings on this subject. She currently serves on the standing Committee on Law and Justice also in the National Academy of Sciences.
Bruce Western is the Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice and Co-Director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. His research has examined the causes, scope, and consequences of the historic growth in U.S. prison populations. Current projects include a randomized experiment assessing the effects of criminal justice fines and fees on misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma City, and a field study of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania state prisons. Western is also the Principal Investigator of the Square One Project that aims re-imagine the public policy response to violence under conditions of poverty and racial inequality. He was the Vice Chair of the National Academy of Sciences panel on the causes and consequences of high incarceration rates in the United States. He is the author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018), and Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar, and a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Western received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was born in Canberra, Australia.
