Lauren Valentino
Lauren Valentino is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research uses theories and methods from the interdisciplinary area of culture and cognition to examine how Americans understand and misunderstand various forms of inequality. She often does novel data collection involving mixed methods, including interviews, surveys, and online experiments. Current projects include mapping laypersons' definitions of racism, sexism, and classism; examining the link between occupational segregation and health; and designing interventions to educate Americans about racial and gender disparities in wealth.
Dr. Valentino earned her PhD in Sociology from Duke University in 2019 and completed a one-year postdoc at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics before joining the Sociology Department at Ohio State where she was an Assistant Professor from 2020 to 2023. Her research has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Problems and other venues. She is the recipient of a Russell Sage Foundation Presidential Grant, as well as several other internal grants from Ohio State and Duke University. She teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses on the Sociology of Culture, Inequality and Stratification, Gender Equity in STEM, and Introduction to Sociology.