SRA New Members 2025

Shawn Bauldry is a Professor at Purdue University. His work bridges methodological innovation with substantive insights into aging and health. His methodological contributions center on developing structural equation models, particularly measurement models and approaches for longitudinal data. His substantive research examines how socioeconomic resources and health interrelate across generations and over the life course, spanning health transitions from adolescence to adulthood, intergenerational resource transfers, evolving health lifestyles, and physical and cognitive functioning among older adults. Throughout this work, he applies a life course perspective that emphasizes temporal interconnections and the cultural embeddedness of social phenomena.

Matthew E. Brashears is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of South Carolina. He uses evolutionary theory, social networks, ecological models, and neuroscience to link cognition to social network structure, to study the effects of error and error correction on diffusion dynamics, and to connect individual behavior to collective dynamics. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation as well as the Department of Defense and has appeared in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Networks, Network Science, Advances in Group Processes and Frontiers in Cognitive Psychology, among others.

Shannon Cavanagh is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Faculty Research Associate at the Population Research Center at University of Texas. Cavanagh's research focuses on the ways American families change over time as well as reflect and contribute to growing levels of social inequality. This includes exploring 1) children’s experiences with their parents’ partner instability and 2) the transition into adulthood amidst social change. Her work on family instability documents children’s movement into and out of different family structures, households, and childcare arrangements and exploring the ways these experiences shape young people’s health, academic, and social relationships including family building behaviors across the early life course. Other research examines the transition to adulthood among young adults during periods of economic uncertainty and cultural change.

Jacob E. Cheadle is Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. His work emphasizes the interplay of microsocial and neurobiosocial processes in shaping the social contours of health and well-being through affective and emotional life. To these ends, he pursues methodological innovation, utilizing biosensors, neuroimaging, bioassays, ecological momentary assessment, and experimental designs to study emotion, stress, and social experiences in everyday life. A former Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar and current faculty research associate in UT’s Population Research Center, his work has been supported by the NIH and published in sociology, neuroscience, and general science journals.

Sarah Damaske is the Roy C. Buck Professor of American Institutions and Sociology, Labor and Employment Relations, and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Damaske's research examines how workers negotiate and transition across work and family domains over the life course, revealing how they resist, revise, and reconstitute shared beliefs about gender and work. Dr. Damaske is the author of three books, including The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America (Princeton University Press), which won the American Sociological Association’s William J. Goode Book Award and For the Family: How Class and Gender Shape Women’s Work (Oxford University Press), which won the National Women’s Studies Association Sarah Whaley Prize and the North Central Sociological Association’s Scholarly Achievement Award.

Michele Dillon is Professor of Sociology and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of New Hampshire. Educated at University College Dublin and the University of California-Berkeley, she has published extensively on contemporary Catholicism, including issues of authority, power, and post-secularity. Her second research focus, funded by Templeton Foundation and other grants, is the longitudinal, interdisciplinary study of life-course and generational impacts on religion. Dillon has held numerous leadership roles in sociology’s professional associations, and she is frequently interviewed by national and international media. In 2025, she was awarded the Civitas Dei Medal from Villanova University.

Thurston Domina is Robert W. Eaves Distinguished Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill School of Education. Domina studies the relationship between education and social inequality. Working in partnership with state- and district-level educational leaders, he investigates the ways family resources, school-level practices, and broader policy structures interact to produce, reproduce – and occasionally interrupt – durable social inequalities. He is co-author, with Andrew Penner and Emily Penner, of Schooled and Sorted: How Educational Categories Create Inequality (Russell Sage Foundation, 2023). He earned his PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Cynthia Feliciano is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research examines the development and consequences of group boundaries and inequalities based on race, ethnicity, class, immigrant status, and gender. Much of her work focuses on how descendants of Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian immigrants are incorporated into U.S. society, with particular attention to the determinants of socioeconomic inequality and processes of ethnic and racial boundary-making and relations. She has published widely, including articles in American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, and Social Forces, and has been a fellow of the Ford, Spencer, and Russell Sage Foundations.

Nilda Flores-González is John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. Her research explores the effects of racialization on youth adults’ understanding of national belonging in the United States. She is the author of Citizens but not Americans: Race and Belonging among Latino Millennials (NYU Press, 2017), and School Kids, Street Kids: Identity Development in Latino Students (Teachers College Press 2002), and co-editor of Marcha: Latino Chicago in the Immigrant Rights Movement (University of Illinois Press 2010) and  Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Era (University of Illinois Press 2013.) 

Yao Lu is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Her research is at the intersection of inequality, demography, and political sociology. Her current work centers on two main areas. The first examines inequalities in the college-to-work transition, with a focus on the rise of the college-educated working class and its sociopolitical implications. This research highlights how members of this emerging group interpret and respond to employment challenges and economic insecurity differently from the traditional less-educated working class. She co-directs a research initiative dedicated to studying this growing segment of the working class. Her second line of research focuses on political demography and investigates how structural demographic shifts contribute to democratic development or erosion across global contexts. She uses a variety of methods in her work and engages in original data collection through surveys, experiments, and in-depth interviews.

Roslyn Arlin Mickelson is Chancellor’s Professor and Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Women & Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research examines stratification and education, and how school organizational structures intersect with students’ race/ethnicity, gender, and social class to shape secondary and post-secondary educational processes and outcomes. Mickelson is a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and of the National Educational Policy Center.

Alexis R. Piquero is Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology and Arts & Sciences Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami and previously served as the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), one of the nation’s thirteen federal statistical agencies (appointed by President Biden, June 2022). His research focuses on criminal careers, crime and justice policy, and quantitative research methods. Piquero has received numerous research, teaching, and mentoring awards including recipient of the following: Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Bruce Smith, Sr. Award for lifetime contributions to criminal justice; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of Developmental & Life-Course Criminology of the American Society of Criminology; the University of Miami Provost Award for Research Excellence; the University of Florida's College of Arts & Sciences Teacher of the Year Award; the University of Texas Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, and induction into The University of Texas System’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

Abigail Saguy is UCLA Professor of Sociology with a courtesy appointment in Gender Studies. She is the author of What is Sexual Harassment? From Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne (California, 2003), What’s Wrong with Fat (Oxford, 2013); Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are (Oxford, 2020), over thirty scientific journal articles; and several op-eds published in leading news outlets. She is currently revising a book, provisionally titled Gender Collisions, that examines current political debates over gender in the United States.

Daniel Schneider is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Sociology in FAS at Harvard University.  He is co-director of The Shift Project. His research is at the intersection of inequality, labor, social demography, and social policy. His current work examines the causes, contours, and consequences of precarious working conditions and leverages novel survey data and stakeholder partnerships to understand how labor standards and company practices shape working conditions, economic security, and the wellbeing of workers and their families.

Xi Song is the Schiffman Family Presidential Professor of Sociology and Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include social mobility, Asian Americans, occupations and work, demography, and quantitative methodology. She is currently leading two projects: (1) examining occupational restructuring in the U.S. and its implications for the future of worker mobility; and (2) exploring the historical origins of the “Model Minority” narrative among Asian Americans. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2015 and was awarded the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award by the ASA in 2021.

Jenny Trinitapoli is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Committee for International Social Science Research at the University of Chicago. Her work features the demographer’s characteristic concern with data and denominators and an insistence on connecting demographic processes to questions of meaning. She has written extensively on the role of religion in the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. The role and impact of religion permeate much of her research. Since 2008, she has been the principal investigator of Tsogolo la Thanzi (TLT)—an ongoing longitudinal study of young adults in Malawi. TLT asks how young adults negotiate relationships, sex, and childbearing with a severe AIDS epidemic swirling around them. The TLT research centre, located in Balaka (Southern Malawi), is staffed by over two dozen talented locals and supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Paul von Hippel works on research methods, evidence-based policy, education and inequality, and transforming education through technology and the science of learning. He has won three best-article awards for his work on education and obesity, as well as the 2019 Leo Goodman Award for contributions to statistical methods within 15 years of receiving a PhD. Before his academic career, he worked as a data scientist, using predictive analytics to help banks prevent fraud. He holds degrees in statistics and sociology from Ohio State University, as well as degrees in music from Yale and Stanford. He still plays jazz piano.

Melissa J. Wilde is the Davidson Kennedy Professor in the College at the University of Pennsylvania. A sociologist of religion and inequality, she received her PhD from the University of California, Berkely in 2002 and joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006.  She has two books, (Vatican II, Princeton University Press, 2007 and Birth Control Battles, UC Press, 2020) and numerous articles in the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology. An award-winning sociologist and mentor, Wilde has received numerous honors from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, including the Charles Tilly Best Article Award in Comparative-Historical Sociology.  She recently received the Dean’s Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Research from Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences. She was President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in 2014.

Alford Young, Jr. is Associate Director of Center for Social Solutions; Arthur F. Thurnau Professor; Edgar G. Epps Collegiate Professor of Sociology; Professor of Afroamerican and African studies; and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He is also President-Elect of the American Sociological Association.  His research centers on three general areas, all of which concern the phenomenon of race or the social experiences of African Americans, and all employ ethnographic, interview-based research methods. First, he is engaged in a series of projects on urban-based, low-income African Americans, exploring how they conceive of work opportunity and the world of work in modern society. Second, he is conducting a study of how African American scholars who research and teach about the African American experience address issues concerning the social utility of their scholarship and how that relates to their sense of mission and purpose as academics. Third, he is involved in a several small-scale studies of American higher education that address the experiences of faculty and students of color.