The University of Michigan distinguished itself this week as the most awarded university at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in Chicago, sweeping in 19 awards– 11 of them from the university’s Department of Sociology.

Two of the ASA recognitions went to trainees of the Population Studies Center’s training program and affiliates of the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics at the University of Michigan: Davis Daumler and Jane Furey, both 2025 graduates of the programs.

Daumler and Furey have both made significant contributions to what we know about inequality. 

Davis Daumler‘s dissertation helped reveal how the temporal dynamics of families accumulate into generational inequalities. His project consisted of two lines of research on social stratification– investigating the life-course dynamics of childhood poverty, and the historical dynamics of family wealth accumulation.

Jane Furey‘s paper,  “The Consequences of Racialized Education Careers: How Education Upgrading Maintains Black-White Economic Inequality,” earned the Graduate Student Paper Award in three categories. Furey’s dissertation work investigated the social and economic implications of education later in life, revealing that education over the life course has the capacity to both expand or reduce inequality at the population level.

Furey, who worked under PSC mentor Natasha Pilkauskas, is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Population Research Center of The University of Texas at Austin. Davis, a PSC mentee of Sasha Killewald, Director of the Stone Center at the University of Michigan, is now a Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. 
Read more about the ASA award winners from U-M Sociology and the larger university, from Sociology’s Emily Buckley: myumi.ch/8qypP