Greer Mellon

Greer Mellon is a Ph.D. student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia University. Her research interests include inequality, education, organizations, and political sociology. Her current research explores how the system of “local control” in U.S. education contributes to educational inequality. She has built a national longitudinal database of school district superintendent employment histories to examine how changes in local school district management affect students’ academic outcomes. She is also developing a national longitudinal database of U.S. school board election results, to examine how the shifting partisan compositions of school boards contributes to educational inequality. Greer is also pursuing a dual M.A. in Statistics at Columbia University.

Greer’s other academic projects include examining explanations for college major choice among low-income college students and assessing trends in the gender gap in early elementary school achievement.

Before beginning her Ph.D., Greer worked in applied nonprofit and government research. She was formerly the Director of Evaluation and Development at the Digital Harbor Foundation, a technology education nonprofit in Baltimore, MD. She also worked as a Research Analyst at Legal Services Corporation, the US government agency responsible for distributing funding to legal civil aid organizations. She also worked as a Consultant at Novakultura Consulting, where she worked on data analysis for the National Endowment for the Arts, and for Benenson Strategy Group, chief pollster to President Barack Obama.

Greer received an MPhil in Development Studies (Department of International Development) from Oxford University, where she was the recipient of a Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship. She also graduated with a BA, magna cum laude, in History and Art History from Columbia University, where she was a John Jay Scholar.

•    MA Sociology, Columbia University, 2018
•    MPhil Development Studies, Oxford University, 2013
•    BA History and Art History, Columbia University, 2011

•      Introduction to Social Data Analysis II – Lab Instructor (1^st Year PhD Course taught by Bruce Western), 2019
•      Introduction to Social Data Analysis I  - Lab Instructor (1^st Year PhD Course taught by Yao Lu), 2018
•      Advanced Analytic Techniques, (taught by Greg Eirich), 2018
•      Sociology of Schools, Teaching and Learning (taught by Teresa Sharpe), 2017