# Alexandra Gibbons Doctoral Student in Sociology ![Alex Gibbons](/sites/g/files/omnuum1481/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2025-09/Alexandra%20Gibbons.JPG?itok=syiswXm0) email **Research Interests:** Crime and Punishment; Community and Urban Sociology; Race and Ethnicity; Immigration; Class; Inequality; Quantitative Methods **Alexandra (Alex) Gibbons** is a PhD student in Sociology and a Presidential Scholar in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Her research examines the criminal legal system, focusing on both the patterns of contact across different demographic groups and birth cohorts and the consequences of such contact for individuals, families, and communities. She primarily uses quantitative methods and is especially interested in expanding the data infrastructure and methodological approaches used to study incarceration in the United States. For instance, in collaboration with Chris Wildeman, Robert Apel, and Martin Eiermann, she is developing a new variable to distinguish between prison and jail incarceration in the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. In a separate independent project, she is examining cause-of-death misclassifications in correctional mortality records using computational text analysis of court and newspaper data. Alex graduated *summa cum laude* from Cornell University in 2022 and wrote her honors thesis on the geography of imprisonment in New York State. Before starting graduate school, she worked with Chris Wildeman as a Research Associate at Duke University, contributing to sociological research on the criminal legal system and the child welfare system. **Previous Degrees:** BA in Sociology, Cornell University (2022) - ## Countries [United States](/country/united-states) - ## Geographic Areas [North America](/geographic-areas/north-america) - ## Research Clusters (Grad) [Crime & Punishment](/graduate-student-research-clusters/crime-punishment) [Health & Population](/graduate-student-research-clusters/health-population) [Inequality](/graduate-student-research-clusters/inequality) [Political & Historical Sociology](/graduate-student-research-clusters/political-historical-sociology) [Race, Ethnicity and Immigration](/graduate-student-research-clusters/race-ethnicity-and-immigration) [Urban Poverty & the City](/graduate-student-research-clusters/urban-poverty-city) - ## Graduate Students by Academic Advisor [Christopher Muller](/graduate-students-academic-advisor/christopher-muller) - ## Graduate Students by Cohort [2025 (G1)](/graduate-students-cohort/2025-g1) - ## Graduate Students by Last Name [D - G](/graduate-students-last-name/d-g) - ## Current People [Graduate Students](/grad-students)