Sociology and Criminal Justice welcomes new faculty

​Monica Sanders has extensive experience in practice and government. Her current work involves policy strategy related to internet governance, data in disasters and how to use technology to reach vulnerable populations. She previously served as Senior Committee Counsel in the House and Senate, where she focused on national security, including Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure issues, and non-profit leadership positions with the American Red Cross and Internet Infrastructure Coalition. Her policy and legal background also include humanitarian and international affairs work.

Read More on Monica Sanders, BAF Director

​Dr. DeYoung, a new faculty member in sociology and criminal justice, joins UD after three years at the University of Georgia where she launched the undergraduate program in Disaster Management. She completed her postdoc at UD in the Disaster Research Center and has a PhD from North Carolina State University in applied social and community psychology. She has deployed for research fieldwork for nine major disaster events, including the Nepal (Gorkha) earthquake in 2015. She has been awarded research grants from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, & Medicine, the National Science Foundation, and the Natural Hazards Center. Her research expertise include evacuation decision-making, companion animals in disasters, infant feeding in emergencies, and refugee well-being. 

Dr. DeYoung will be loacted at 166E Graham Hall in the Disaster Research Center

Dr. Bruch focuses broadly on social stratification and public policy. In particular, she focuses on integrating theoretical insights from relational and social theorists into the empirical study of inequalities. She brings this approach to the study of social policy, education, race, politics, and citizenship.

Her current research includes three streams. The first focuses on U.S. social policies, examining their social and distributional impacts as well as their consequences for civic and political life. The second focuses on schools as organized sites of racialized authority relations that shape life trajectories and function as formative experiences of citizenship. The third focuses on the interplay of racial and economic inequalities, seeking to clarify how they relate to each other, how they are connected to state policy choices, and how they are produced through specific relational and policy mechanisms.

Vican received her doctorate in sociology from Harvard University and was previously a research fellow at Catalyst Inc. Across her research, Vican seeks to understand how organizational practices, managerial behavior, and workplace culture shape individual career outcomes as well as broader patterns of labor market inequality.

Her research combines quantitative and qualitative methods across a variety of empirical settings, including diversity management departments at Fortune 500 firms and STEM disciplines in academia.

Read more on UD ADVANCE blog: Shawna Vican Named Director of UD ADVANCE