Access: A Social History of Internet Policy Along the Mississippi, Charles, and Potomac Rivers, 1984 to 2004

​Special Award: John L. Stanley Award

Marc Aidinoff is a doctoral candidate at MIT in the Program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) and an affiliate of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative. A former Obama Administration adviser, his current project examines access to networked computing as a crucial element of social policy.

Citizen Oversight of Police: Impact on Racial Disparities in Policing Outcomes, the 'Ferguson Effect', and Reasons for Creation

Mir Usman Ali's research focuses on citizen-led accountability, institutional change, and on how public managers shape social equity outcomes in response to institutional, organizational and behavioral cues. He holds an MS in statistics from Texas A&M University, has worked in various managerial roles, and teaches policy analysis and
research methods.

When Your Own Team is against You: Racial Bias in Criminal Defense

Joseph Avery is a PhD student at Princeton University. He holds degrees in philosophy, economics, psychology, and law, and he has practiced as an attorney. Joseph's research employs psychology to explain sub-optimal legal decision making, and it employs computer science and public policy to devise interventions that improve legal decision making.

Understanding Establishment-Level ICE Raids

Neil Bennett is a graduate student studying Economics at UC, Irvine. Her dissertation is focused on migration decisions and immigration policies. The final chapter of her dissertation, Understanding Establishment-Level ICE Raids, evaluates how Secure Communities impacted the effectiveness of work place audits conducted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Control During Confinement: Racial Disparities in Discipline and Resource Allocation in Penal Institutions

Bridget Brew is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Cornell University. She investigates formal and extralegal punishments and systems of support in penal institutions in order to elucidate how the carceral experience intersects with broader systems of racial, economic, and gender stratification.

State Earned Income Tax Credits: Addressing Poverty and Inequality through State Tax Systems

Carmen Brick is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She examines the potential of state-level Earned Income Tax Credits to reduce poverty and inequality by studying their adoption contexts. She was previously a Presidential Management Fellow and is a Scholars Strategy Network Graduate Fellow.

The Impact of Patient Cost Sharing on Medical Service Use and Price

Betsy Cliff's research focuses on understanding the effects of cost-sharing structure in health insurance design and the use of consumerism to drive efficiency in the health system. Her work informs the ongoing effort to mitigate health care spending at the national level and improve affordability for individual families.

Unexpected Consequences of Marijuana Legalization on Youth

Caislin Firth is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology at University
of Washington whose overarching research interests are to
understand the impacts of policies on social and built
environments and their influence on health inequities. Her
dissertation examines the impacts of cannabis legalization
on neighborhoods, underage use and juvenile justice
outcomes.

Waging a Public Health War: The Criminal Justice System’s Impact on the Opioid Epidemic

Special Award: Donald R. Cressey Award

Carrie E. Fry is a doctoral candidate in Health Policy with a concentration in evaluation and statistics at Harvard University. Her research interests include access to health care and coverage for vulnerable and under-served populations, behavioral health policy, and social and public health policy evaluation.

The Governance of Artificial Intelligence

​Special Award: Martinus Nijhoff Award

Carlos Ignacio Gutierrez is a doctoral candidate at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Most of his work lies at the intersection of policy and technology. His dissertation examines scenarios where Artificial Intelligence generates regulatory gaps, instances where public policies cease to adequately confront the issues faced by society.

The Impact of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion on Low-Income Young Adults

Special Award: Irving Louis Horowitz Award

Christal Hamilton is a PhD candidate in public affairs at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her research examines the impacts of income inequality on the health and education outcomes of young adults as they transition to adulthood. She received her Master’s in public affairs from the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Whose Good Death? Understanding Inequality and the End of Life

Katrina Hauschildt is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan. Her work explores how the organization of health care delivery may alleviate or exacerbate social disparities in health. Her current research examines how inequalities emerge in end-of-life health care communication and decision making.

Punishing the Poorest: How the Criminalization of Homelessness Perpetuates Poverty

Chris Herring is a doctoral candidate of Sociology at the University of California Berkeley. His dissertation examines the causes and consequences of criminalizing homelessness in San Francisco. His writing is featured in Social Problems, City and Community, City, ACME, Teaching Sociology, and edited volumes.

Judging Lesbian Job Candidates: An Intersectional Analysis of Employer Behavior towards Lesbians in the US Labor Force

Emma Mishel has an MA in applied quantitative research and an MA in sociology. She is currently a PhD Candidate in sociology at NYU. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, social psychology, and experimental methods. Her recent research investigates the nature and consequences of workplace discrimination against sexual minorities.

Women as Catalysts for Human Development: Evidence from Pakistan

Tareena Musaddiq is a PhD candidate in Economics at Georgia State University. Her research interests are in education, health, and development economics. Her dissertation focuses on how primary and secondary education for girls in Pakistan impacts their later life outcomes as well as human capital of their next generation.

The Causes and Consequences of Poverty in US States: Examining Prevalence and Penalties, 1993-2015

Special Award: Robert K. Merton Award

D. Adam Nicholson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. His interests are in the areas of poverty and inequality, political sociology, social movements, and racism, pursued primarily through the use of quantitative and experimental methods.

Health without Wealth: The Social Role and Spatial Context of the Community Health Center Program

Emily Parker is a PhD candidate in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University, with a concentration in Sociology and minor in Demography. Her research uses mixed methods to explore spatial variation in access to the health care safety net for low-income populations.

The Multiethnic Suburb: New Ground for Racial Residential Integration in the United States

Ankit Rastogi is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Their research locates racially-integrated communities in the US in the contemporary context of expanding multi-ethnic diversity in the suburbs. Rastogi explores how integrated communities mediate cross-racial interaction and outcomes for residents.

Safety Net Cutbacks and Private Hospital Service Provision: Evidence from Psychiatric Care

Special Award: Eli Ginzberg Award

Rebecca Sachs is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is interested in health economics and public finance. Her dissertation explores how private health care organizations respond to changes in government policy surrounding care for low-income individuals.

Tenure and Location Choice among Hispanic Households

Rocio Sanchez-Moyano is PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her research interests include access to home ownership and housing choice among low-income and minority families. Her dissertation focuses on the geography of Hispanic home ownership.

Effect of the Affordable Care Act on Utilization of Emergency and Primary Care

Paul Shafer is a health economist whose research focuses on health insurance policy and how it influences how people use health care. He is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar and is joining the Department of Health Law, Policy, and Management at Boston University in August 2019.

Getting Well: Using, Selling, and Quitting Opioids in California

David Showalter is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. David's research addresses issues at the intersection of health, law, and politics, particularly drug use and drug policy. David also serves as President of the Board of Directors for Needle Exchange Emergency
Distribution (NEED) in Berkeley.

Is Policy Implementation Lost in Translation? Taking the Global Small-Scale Fisheries Policy to Scale in Tanzania

Hillary Smith is a PhD candidate in Marine Science and Conservation at Duke University whose work looks at the intersection of gender and fisheries policy. Her project examines the first global policy designed for small-scale fisheries, following how and whether this tool translates into more gender equitable fisheries in practice.

A Double-Edged Bytesaber: The Heterogenous Effect of Internet Control on National Competitiveness

Meicen Sun is a PhD candidate of international relations and political economy at MIT where she examines the impact of information policy on great power relations. She received her AB with Honors from Princeton University and her AM with a Certificate in Law from the University of Pennsylvania.

Imagining the Unimaginable: War, Weapons and Procurement Politics

​Special Award: Harold D. Lasswell Award

Sanne Verschuren is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Brown University. She is interested in the development of weapon technology, shifts in military strategy and tactics, and the role of ideas and norms therein. Sanne's dissertation examines why and how countries decide to procure different types of weapon capabilities.