The Stone Center’s fourth cohort of postdoctoral scholars, Tina Law and Manuel Schechtl, are starting new tenure-track positions this summer after completing their two-year terms at the Graduate Center. Law will be an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, and Schechtl will be an assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Law plans to continue her core work examining issues of race, inequality, and democracy in U.S. cities, as well as several research projects she started at the Stone Center that focus on innovations in computational methodology. She is particularly looking forward to continuing her research on housing and local governance in California, which she calls “pressing policy issues facing the state.” Law, who recently published “Training Computational Social Science Ph.D. Students for Academic and Non-Academic Careers” in PS: Political Science & Politics, will also be teaching courses on social statistics and social networks.
Among the new research projects that Law developed during her postdoctoral fellowship is a collaborative project with Stone Center Associate Director Leslie McCall that focuses on AI and public policy. As part of this project, Law and McCall are examining the rapidly evolving AI public policy landscape and developing a framework to support social scientists to contribute to public conversations on AI in a more coordinated and robust manner. “AI has many profound social and political implications for Americans and we believe social scientists have much expertise to contribute to the development of AI policy,” Law says.
Law is eager to work with undergraduate and graduate students at UC Davis. “I’m excited to be joining a university that works incredibly hard to support first-generation college students, students from immigrant and refugee families, and students from low-income backgrounds,” she says. Law grew up nearby in Sacramento and has previously shared her experiences of navigating academia as a first-generation student. “Being able to come home in this way is an immense privilege and I am committed to paying it forward.”
Schechtl, a sociologist who also worked on The GC Wealth Project, is looking forward to continuing to work in the type of interdisciplinary environment he experienced at the Stone Center. “Being in touch with scholars who are sociologists, who are economists, who are political scientists and philosophers and historians — that will keep me on the ideal route that I started on here,” he says. “I have always been interested in questions that span multiple disciplines.”
Schechtl’s projects at the Stone Center have ranged from a paper based on cross-national data collected in the Estate, Inheritance, and Gift Taxes section of the GC Wealth Project site to a project with Stone Center Affiliated Scholar Regina Baker, also at UNC Chapel Hill, on the legacy of slavery in the U.S. South and differences in mobility outcomes for low-income children.
In addition to the Stone Center’s interdisciplinary orientation, Schechtl valued the freedom he had as a postdoc. “I’ve had two years of doing what I think is interesting, what I want to get to know, what I think is fun,” he says. “That is literally unmatched in any other circumstances that one might have in university. These postdoc years are really just about your research, which is an incredible opportunity and essentially gave me the freedom, the leverage, and the room to publish and get a head start for the tenure track.”
Schechtl says he benefitted from the time he spent working with Stone Center Director Janet Gornick and GC Wealth Project Director Salvatore Morelli. “Janet’s supervision and intellectual curiosity helped tremendously in thinking through a joint project on wealth insufficiency, and our coauthored paper is now under review,” he says. “Moreover, working on estate and inheritance taxes within the GC Wealth Project under the supervision of Salvatore allowed me to form part of a similarly minded research community beyond the Stone Center.”
Law also valued having dedicated time to focus on her research, and having opportunities to connect with scholars in the city, the Graduate Center, and the Stone Center, particularly Leslie McCall. “She has helped me to understand who I am as a scholar and the type of work I want to focus on creating,” Law says. “Providing feedback on drafts in record speed and impeccable detail, answering questions about the tenure track, having big picture conversations — she’s been there for all of it over the past two years.”
The Stone Center’s newest cohort of postdocs will start in September. For a full list of the Stone Center’s current and former postdoctoral scholars, and more information about the program, see the Postdoctoral Scholars page.
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