Social and Economic Inequality

Marcos is a Ph.D. student in the School of Public Policy. He is interested in development and environmental economics, and its relation to human capital.

David Blazar is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland College Park in the Education Policy program, as well as the faculty director of the Maryland Equity Project and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Economics and the School of Public Policy. With training in the economics of education and education policy, Blazar's research examines the efficient, effective, and equitable allocation of educational resources, focusing in particular on resources related to teachers.

Robert Stewart is a sociologist and criminologist who studies the social, political, and collateral consequences of criminal legal involvement, with an emphasis on the accumulating effects of criminal legal interaction and criminal records on impacted people and communities. As an advocate of public criminology, he believes that communicating our work effectively to policymakers, practitioners, and the public is a fundamental part of scholarship.

Dr. M. Bishop is an Assistant Professor in the department of Family Science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, College Park. Bishop’s scholarship employs developmental, intersectional, and community-engaged approaches to document the lives and health of LGBTQ+ people across the life course, with a particular emphasis on youth. Bishop’s current research explores how youth development, social and familial relationships, school contexts, and structural stigma shape LGBTQ+ people’s health and thriving. Bishop received a B.A.

Daniel is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He completed his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley in 2024. Daniel's research focuses on urbanization, agricultural transformation, and social networks in East Africa. He has ongoing projects in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda. 

Dr. Hargrove’s research examines how racism and other systems of inequality become embodied and impact population health in the United States. Her current program of research investigates linkages among socio-geographic contexts, individual-level status characteristics, and biological measures of health and aging in young adulthood and early mid-life. Through this work, she clarifies how macro- and meso-level environments shape downstream pathways that affect more proximate causes of poor health and risk factors for aging-related diseases. 

I am an economist with over 12 years of experience specializing in trade and private sector development policies. My PhD research focuses on the sustainable development aspects of industrialization and trade relations between countries, particularly with respect to job creation and growth of businesses (especially SMEs).

Laura R. Schneider is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Maryland specializing in social psychology. Her research explores how individuals and groups respond when identities are challenged or disrupted, and how these experiences shape emotion, behavior and collective meaning making. 

At the confluence of social demography, medical sociology, and critical perspectives, my research interests center around incorporating critical perspectives in studying population-level health disparities. More specifically, my work utilizes perspectives grounded in intersectionality and critical race theory to motivate research regarding the fundamental causes of health disparities in the United States context, with a geospatial focus to account for variation in disparities across physical space.