Megan is a sociology doctoral candidate at Princeton University. Her research aims to make sense of gun availability, violence, and organized crime through ethnography and mixed methods.

About me

Megan Kang is PhD candidate at Princeton Sociology, with research interests in crime and deviance, urban sociology, and public policy. She draws on ethnography, interviewing, and econometrics to analyze novel data sources with the goal of identifying effective and humane ways of reducing inequality in safety. Megan is committed to research involving community and civic partners through co-constructed approaches.

Her ethnographic dissertation explores how young adults obtain illegal firearms and the consequences of this on their life trajectories. Her past research focuses on measuring gun availability and its impacts by developing innovative data sources, assessing the effects of state laws on gun mortality, and examining how street gangs shape pathways to crime desistance. More broadly, she is fascinated by how deviant individuals and groups create social order in the absence of formal governance.

Megan’s research has been published in American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Journal of Marriage and Family and has received coverage in NYTimes, Washington Post, Aeon, The Trace, and Vital City. Princeton Sociology recognized her for excellence in teaching and mentorship. She is a recipient of the BRIDGS Emergent Scholar Fellowship.

Prior to Princeton, she was a high school teacher in Detroit and worked on mixed methods research at the University of Chicago Crime Lab. She earned her BA in history and political science from UC Berkeley and a master's degree in public policy from University of Chicago.

Photo: Charles and Jalen from Boxing Out Negativity, Chicago, 2022

**EDUCATION**
Princeton University, Ph.D. (expected May 2026)
Princeton University, M.A.
University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, M.P.P.
University of California, Berkeley, B.A.
**AFFILIATIONS**
Research Affiliate, University of Chicago Crime Lab
Research Affiliate, Violence and Inequality Project
Student Affiliate, Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy
BRIDGS Emergent Scholars Fellow, Center for the Study of Guns in Society

Research

ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

Other adults in the United States: Improving survey measures of youths' non-parental adult relationships, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2025 (with Rachel Brown-Weinstock, Kathryn Edin, Sarah Pachman, and Kaitlyn Bolin) [here]
The Era of Progress on Gun Mortality: State Gun Regulations and Gun Deaths from 1991- 2016, Epidemiology, 2023 (with Patrick Sharkey) [here][working paper] [Covered in NYTimes, Washington Post]
Extending the Firearm Suicide Proxy for Household Gun Ownership, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2023 (with Elizabeth Rasich) [here] [access dataset here] [working paper] [Covered in Aeon, Vital City, The Trace]
State-Level Household Gun Ownership Proxy Dataset, 1949-2020, Data in Brief, 2023 (with Elizabeth Rasich) [here]
Intervention of Choice: Behavioral Science and Gun Violence, Quinnipiac Law Review, 2021 (with Jens Ludwig and Elizabeth Rasich) [here]

WORKING PAPERS (available upon request)

Weaker the Gang, Harder the Exit. Revise & Resubmit at Criminology
Becoming a Shooter: How Guns Shape Delinquency and Desistance Among Urban Youth [Job market paper]
Social Cognition and Neighborhood Violence (with Kathryn Edin, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Timothy Nelson)

DATASETS