Social and Economic Inequality

Michael Lebron is a fifth year doctoral candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Prior to his time at UMD, Michael worked at the National Policing Institute (formerly the National Police Foundation) as a Research Associate where his work was focused on program and policy evaluation. He’s contributed to several NIJ-funded and privately funded projects related to hotspots policing, police agency responses to mental health crises and substance use issues, and sexual assault nurse examiner programs.

Hayley Park is a PhD student whose research examines immigrant information experiences through participatory and mixed methods approaches, alongside critical analyses of technology in a rapidly evolving information environment. Her work focuses on how immigration status and contemporary policy conditions shape immigrants’ information practices.

I am a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Maryland. My research lies at the intersection of population economics, education, and gender, with a focus on how policy and environmental conditions shape human capital and family outcomes. Current projects study access to contraception and fertility, the intergenerational effects of women’s political enfranchisement, and how extreme heat affects student achievement and mitigation behavior.

I am a PhD student of sociology and demography focused on documenting inequalities in the areas of education, family, and development, and geographically in South and Southeast Asia. My work aims to highlight hidden symmetries through which social structures, particularly class and caste, maintain, perpetuate, and legitimize inequalities in the contemporary world. I do so by studying processes within different types of institutions. Previously, I have documented such processes within the classroom and in studying inter- and intra-generational relationships within families.

Guyu Sun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, where she also earned her MA in 2025. She received her BSocSc in Sociology (Honors) from the University of Macau in 2022. Her research examines inequalities in punishment and their collateral consequences, with a particular focus on the experiences of children and adolescents and the roles of peers, parents, teachers, and school contexts. She is also interested in labeling theories and the role of stigma and labeling in different contexts.

Codey is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Codey's research interests include descriptive and causal analyses of place-based crime reduction interventions, service utilization among people who use drugs, and the spatial relationship between overdose and gun violence.

Dahai Yue is a health economist in the Department of Health Policy and Management. His research focuses on social determinants of health and health policy evaluation. He studies how housing, childhood environments, public health insurance, and care coordination affect healthcare utilization and mortality. His work applies natural and quasi-experimental research designs to large-scale datasets, including Medicaid administrative claims and U.S. Census data.

Katrina Walsemann's research examines how social inequities influence life course health. She is particularly interested in how the U.S. education system shapes individuals’ physical, mental, and cognitive health, independent from and in relation to other structural factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, and social class. She has published extensively on how early school environments affect health and health behavior across the life course as well as how student debt influences the psychosocial health of young adults and their aging parents.

I am a stratification sociologist whose recent research focuses on changing gender inequalities in the United States and India. With Dave Cotter and Joan Hermsen, I am trying to understand why the U.S. gender revolution of the 1970s and 1980s seems to have come to a halt in the 1990s. With Sonalde Desai and colleagues in Delhi at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, I have helped field a 40,000 household survey across all Indian states. This panel survey analyzes the relationships of poverty, gender stratification, and social capital on health and education outcomes. 

Sergio Urzúa's research has focused on the role of cognitive and noncognitive abilities, and uncertainty as determinants of schooling decisions, labor market outcomes and social behavior. His research in econometrics is mainly concerned with the estimation of selection models with unobserved heterogeneity. Recently, he has analyzed the effects of early endowments on academic and labor market outcomes. His research agenda includes the evaluation of social programs in developing economies.