Kara Young-Kara Young received her PhD spring 2017 from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She does research on food choice, health and inequality, social stratification and racial disparities. Her current project examines how inequalities of race, class, and food access shape people's daily food consumption practices and food related health aspirations. Through in-depth interviews and extended observations in a neighborhood with a variety of grocery stores close by and a neighborhood with none, Kara examines the meanings that people attach to the food options available around them, how they organize their practices within the set of choices available to them, and how they feel about themselves as they succeed and fail at approximating their health and eating aspirations from day-to-day. During her time at UC Berkeley, she served as a graduate fellow at the Center for Research on Social Change, an organizer and graduate fellow at the Berkeley Food Institute, and graduate student in residence at the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. Originally from Cleveland, she is excited to return back to Ohio to teach at Ohio State.
Natasha Quadlin receivedher PhD fromt Indiana University, where she also completed master's degrees in sociology and applied statistics. She received her BS in social policy from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on social inequality in access and returns to education. She is particularly interested in using experimental methods to assess why gender and economic inequalities persist in social life. Her dissertation, for example, uses a series of original experiments and surveys to examine gender differences in returns to academic performance. She has also conducted research on inequalities among college students, including how college funding sources and gender are related to student experiences and decision-making. Currently, she is starting to work on a collaborative project that will examine Americans' perceptions of responsibility for college costs--i.e., who is viewed as responsible for paying, and how the notion of responsibility varies across social groups.
