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Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland

Dr. Rashawn Ray is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution and Associate Professor of Sociology, the Edward McK. Johnson, Jr. Endowed Faculty Fellow, and Co-Director of the Critical Race Initiative at the University of Maryland, College Park. Formerly, Ray was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Ray’s research addresses the mechanisms that manufacture and maintain racial and social inequality. His work also speaks to ways that inequality may be attenuated through racial uplift activism and social policy. Ray has published over 40 books, articles, book chapters, and op-eds. Currently, Ray is co-investigator of a study examining implicit bias, body-worn cameras, and police-citizen interactions with 1800 police officers with the Prince George’s County Police Department.

Ray has written for New York Times, Huffington Post, and Public Radio International. Selected as 40 Under 40 Prince George's County and awarded the 2016 UMD Research Communicator Award, Ray has appeared on HLN, Al Jazeera, NPR, Fox, and NBC. His research is cited in CNN, Washington Post, Associated Press, MSN, The Root, and The Chronicle. Previously, Ray served on the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington Planning Committee and the Commission on Racial Justice with Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Currently, he serves on the 2018 American Sociological Association Conference Planning Committee, the American Sociological Association Committee on the Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Sociology as well as editorial boards for Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Social Psychology Quarterly, Social Currents, and Sociology Compass. He is also one of the new co-editors of Contexts Magazine, which is the public face of the American Sociological Association.

Experience

  • –present
    Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland

Education

  • 2010 
    Indiana University, Sociology