Shay O'Brien

2021-2022 Data Fellow

Shay O'Brien

Shay is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology department specializing in elites in the United States. Her work focuses on elite sociology, economic sociology, race & ethnicity, gender, and religion. Shay’s dissertation traces the movement of wealth over time in a population of elites using a novel dataset of the members of Dallas high society from 1890-1960. Before beginning graduate school at Princeton, Shay worked on a large-scale randomized control trial at the social policy research firm MDRC. She graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Anthropology (Honors), where she was a research assistant in the Anthropology department and won the prizes for Best Honors Thesis and Highest Achievement in Linguistic Anthropology.