Quick Facts
Biography
Rashawn Ray is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He became a professor after obtaining his Ph.D. in Sociology from Indiana University - Bloomington in 2010. Ray is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and has also been mentioned by the Huffington Post. Beginning in August 2017 he begin working on his first edition of Contexts magazine with fellow co-editor Fabio Rojas.
Career
Ray graduated from Indiana University, Bloomington with a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2010. He now works as an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. From 2010-2012 he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley/UCSF. His work pertains to social inequality and focuses on race and social activism. He is the author of Race and Ethnic Relations in the 21st Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy.
He will the be the co-editor of the magazine Contexts: Understanding People in their Social Worlds, a publication of the American Sociological Association, with his first issue to be released in February 2018.
Awards
In 2016, Ray won University of Maryland's Research Communicator Impact Award. He also has been awarded mentorship awards from the Philip Merrill Presidential Scholars Program and the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program. Furthermore, he has received the Teaching in Excellence Award from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland.
Public work
Ray has written several articles for the New York Times on a wide range of social topics including race and policing, healthcare, parenting styles, and more. He has also been featured on Fox News Cincinnati and NBC News Washington. In addition to the current book he has pulibshed, Ray is working on two additional books: The Loves Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class with Dr. Kris Marsh and Bordering Chaos: Family and Work in a Racially-Diverse America with Dr. Pam Jackson.