curriculum vitae

Summary of Professional Experience

Megan’s work centers on understanding pathways to promote equity, justice, and wellbeing for people involved with the criminal legal system and their loved ones. She has extensive experience conducting qualitative research on topics such as the repercussive effects of incarceration on family relationships, the health care needs of women navigating intersectional disadvantage, and how systems perpetuate and intensify structural racism. Formerly a senior fellow and founding member of RTI International’s Transformative Research Unit for Equity (TRUE), Co-Director of TRUE’s Emerging Equity Scholars program, and affiliated faculty in the Division of Prevention Science at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Megan has been principal investigator, multiple principal investigator, or co-investigator on numerous studies funded by the National Institutes of Health. She also has led the qualitative component of projects funded by Arnold Ventures and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation evaluating innovative approaches to decreasing the use of jails by diverting people from incarceration and increasing the use of pretrial release. 

Megan is strongly invested in mentoring early-career researchers, including first-generation college students, family members of incarcerated people, and scholars who have been involved with the criminal legal system. She was awarded the 2024 Peterson-Krivo Mentorship Award by the Crime, Law and Deviance and the Sociology of Law sections of the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and a coauthor with Tasseli McKay, Christine Lindquist, and Anupa Bir of Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry (University of California Press, 2019). Her work has been published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Criminology & Public Policy, RSF: The Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences, and Journal of Poverty, among other journals, and has been translated into four languages.