Welcome! My name is Marissa Thompson and I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. My research interests include social stratification, education, race/ethnicity, and social policy.

I study the social categories and boundaries that sort people into unequal positions across contexts. My current projects investigate, for example, the negotiation and maintenance of racial boundaries, how classifications such as ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ shape preferences for redistribution, and the consequences of individual choices for aggregate patterns of segregation. I use a variety of empirical approaches in my work, including quantitative methods, survey and audit experiments, and both computational and qualitative analyses of text data. My research has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Science, Sociology of Education, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others.

In addition to research on inequality and social policy, I’m excited about podcasts, knitting, and hiking with my partner Sam and our dog Pickle.