Research Agenda
I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced where I co-founded the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy (HERE) Lab.
I investigates the power of elites in politics and the economy, as well as policy and organizational strategies to promote more equitable distributions of power and wealth. My book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower (University of Chicago Press, 2022), is about the relationship between financialization, inequalities in higher education, and the rise of private equity and hedge fund investors among US billionaires. The book won the Pierre Bourdieu best book award from the American Sociological Association.
My ongoing research examines how billionaires from finance and from big tech adopted more oligarchical roles in US politics.
My writing and research has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, TIME, and Newsweek, among others.
My academic work has been published in American Sociological Review, Review of Financial Studies, Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Sociology of Education, Politics & Society, Research in Higher Education, Sociological Compass, and Socius.
Past funders of my research include the National Science Foundation, Arnold Ventures, and College Futures.
My research uses data carpentry to digitize, link, and construct original data for measuring inequalities in the resources and activities of elites and less powerful social groups. With my collaborators at the HERE Lab, I publish code and data from this work at the Higher Ed Data Hub.