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Aliya Saperstein

Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology

BioProfessor Saperstein received her B.A. in Sociology from the University of Washington and her Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California-Berkeley. In 2016, she received the Early Achievement Award from the Population Association of America. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and Sciences Po (Paris).

Her research focuses on the social processes through which people come to perceive, name, and deploy seemingly immutable categorical differences —such as race and sex—and their consequences for explaining, and reinforcing, social inequality. Her current research projects explore several strands of this subject, including:

1) The implications of methodological decisions, especially the measurement of race/ethnicity and sex/gender in surveys, for studies of stratification and health disparities.
2) The relationship between individual-level category fluidity or ambiguity and the maintenance of group boundaries, racial stereotypes, and hierarchies.

This research has been published for social science audiences in the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, Ethnic & Racial Studies, and Gender & Society, among other venues, and for general science audiences in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and PLoS One. It also has been recognized with multiple article awards, and gained attention from national media outlets, including NPR and The Colbert Report.

Jake Vincent Sapien

Undergraduate, Science, Technology and Society

Contact Info
jsapien@stanford.edu

Paola Sapienza

Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

BioPaola Sapienza is the J-P Conte Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she co-directs the JP Conte Initiative on Immigration and she is a founding member of the Hoover Program on the Foundations for Economic Prosperity. She is Finance Professor Emerita at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, where she was a faculty member for over 25 years. Her research interests span from corporate governance to financial development, from political economy to the economic effects of culture and the economics of immigration. She maintains research affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Center for Economic Policy Research, and European Corporate Governance Institute.

Her work has been published in leading journals including the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Economic Studies, Science, and PNAS. She has appeared multiple times on the Thomson Reuters/Clarivate list of most influential scientific minds, and her research has been featured in major media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the Economist.

Sapienza holds a BA from Bocconi University in Milan and MA and PhD in Economics from Harvard University.