Holly Wood is a doctoral student in Sociology. She received her B.A. with High Honors in Sociology from Wesleyan University in 2008. Her honors thesis at Wesleyan addressed the continually limited representation of low-income students at America's most elite private colleges, examining how cultural capital translates into advantage within the college admissions process despite the proliferation of institutional initiatives to increase student diversity. This project heightened her interest in examining the familial anxiety surrounding class status reproduction and how individual-level processes manifest into macro-level consequences. Thus, Wood's main academic interests revolve around identifying and ameliorating the social mechanisms which perpetuate inequality and stratification. This interest compels her to examine how welfare and other aspects of social policy are experienced in America today. Wood's current research asks the question: how is our nation doing in housing its urban poor in an era of poverty deconcentration? With this in mind, she investigates how poor families navigate public housing policy options in inner-city Boston and Baltimore.

Wesleyan University, B.A. (Sociology, Government) Harvard University, A.M. (Sociology)