Scientific Committee

Jake Hays
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics

Jake’s research centers around family demography, social inequality, and the life course. His current research project examines how local economic conditions shape family formation patterns. In other work, he examines how family and household contexts shape parents’ and children’s well-being and how life course processes are related to broader patterns of social inequality.

Joe LaBriola
Research Assistant Professor, Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics

Joe’s research draws on survey and administrative data to study the causes of population-level racial and socioeconomic inequalities in the contemporary U.S. In his recent work, he advances our understanding of the role of housing in explaining racial wealth gaps in the U.S. by specifically attending to the role of local policies and processes that constrain the production of new housing, and thereby help concentrate wealth in the hands of incumbent homeowners, who are disproportionately White.

Sun Kyoung Lee
Research Assistant Professor, Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics

Sun’s primary research interests include the role of public policies in understanding inequality, urban and housing development, and building large-scale data infrastructures via record linkage. Her research investigates how the provision of urban transportation infrastructure in New York City facilitated racial segregation. In other work, she has created new data to assess intergenerational social mobility across almost 100 years of U.S. history.

Robert Manduca
Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Michigan

Robert’s research asks why some people and some places are more economically prosperous than others. His recent work examines the role that national policy decisions play in determining the economic viability of cities and regions, and the consequences of rising income inequality for social life in the United States.

 Pablo Mitnik
Assistant Research Scientist, Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics

Pablo’s research focuses on intergenerational mobility, economic inequality, labor markets, and statistical methods. A large part of his recent work has aimed at improving the methodological approaches, statistical models, and data used to measure mobility and inequality of opportunity.

Davon Norris
Collegiate Fellow, Organizational Studies, University of Michigan

Davon’s research tries to understand how our tools for determining what is valuable, worthwhile, or good are implicated in patterns of inequality with an acute concern for racial inequality. By focusing on questions of valuation, his research speaks across an array of disciplines and brings into relief normative questions about the nature and possibility of ameliorating (racial) inequality and nurturing economic justice in the contemporary United States. 

Fabian Pfeffer
Director, Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics

Fabian’s research investigates social inequality and its maintenance across time and generations. His current work focuses on wealth inequality and its consequences for the next generation, the transmission of inequality across multiple generations, and the maintenance of inequality through education.

Luciana de Souza Leão
Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Michigan

Luciana is a political and comparative sociologist with broad interests in knowledge-making processes, racial inequalities, and the state. She is currently working on a book project that examines how politics, measurement practices, and expertise shape anti-poverty programs in Brazil and Mexico.

Support Team

Nicole Bonomini
Melissa Bora
Anna Massey