Anna has been involved with the FFCWS for many years. She has used FFCWS data for nearly two decades and serves on the study’s advisory board. Her research examines how three of America’s most powerful social institutions—the education system, the family, and the criminal legal system—connect and interact in ways that both preserve and mitigate social inequality. Her work has focused on early educational outcomes, intergenerational impacts, and disparities by race/ethnicity. Papers using the FFCWS data have been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociological Science, Criminology, Sociology of Education and Social Science Research, among other scholarly outlets, and she is co-editor of the book – When Parents are Incarcerated: Interdisciplinary Research and Interventions to Support Children (2018, APA Press).

Anna’s current projects explore processes through which schools inhibit or promote institutional engagement among system-involved families, as well as studying more complicated intersections between schooling and punishment such as college-in-prison programs. Anna is a former elementary school teacher, a William T. Grant Foundation and National Science Foundation funded scholar, co-editor of the journal Sociology of Education, and is the Andrew V. Tackes Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame.