About me

Megan Kang is PhD candidate at Princeton Sociology, with research interests in criminology, 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 public partners through co-constructed approaches.

Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of how gun violence affects coming of age in Chicago’s West Side. Her broader 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 and trauma influence violence involvement and pathways to crime desistance.

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 also a recipient of the BRIDGS Emergent Scholar Fellowship.

Prior to Princeton, she taught high school English in Detroit through Teach for America and worked on mixed methods research at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, including efforts to understand underlying mechanisms of action as part of large-scale randomized controlled trials. 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