Bio
Marissa Thompson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, co-director of the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality (CWI), and a faculty affiliate of the Columbia Population Research Center. She earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2021 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Education Policy Initiative at the University of Michigan before joining the department in 2022.
Marissa’s research interests include social stratification, education, organizations, race/ethnicity, and social policy. Her current work explores, for example, why Americans are concerned about some (but not all) forms of inequality; how boundaries social groups are negotiated and maintained; and segregation and inequality across educational and occupational contexts. She employs a range of methods in her work, including quantitative methods, survey and audit experiments, and both computational and qualitative analyses of text data. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Science, Sociology of Education, and PNAS, among others.