David Mickey-Pabello is the inaugural research director of the Inland Empire Labor and Community Center at UC Riverside, where he hopes to continue his mission to improve people’s lives through research and its applications. He holds four degrees from the University of Michigan: PhD in Sociology (2019), MA in Sociology, MA in Higher Education, and BA in Applied Linguistics. “Mickey” was most recently a simultaneous postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. At UCLA, he coordinated national- and state-level research efforts focusing on the next quarter century of civil rights research and conducted studies of the relationship between neighborhood gentrification, school segregation, and intergenerational mobility in California. At Harvard, he is the senior associate editor of the Du Bois Review, a social science journal about race and ethnicity housed within Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
His research broadly covers sociology of education, race/ethnicity, social inequality, demography, assortative mating, sociology of law, social policy and specializes in affirmative action bans. He also applies a broad range of methodological approaches in his work: difference in differences, triple differencing, first differences, hierarchical modeling, matching techniques, regression decomposition, event history modeling, and qualitative techniques such as qualitative comparative analysis, and content analysis. He works with several sources of data including the NLYS, NELS, CPS, ACS, AAMC, US World & News Reports rankings, IPEDS, CDC WONDER, and the GSS. Furthermore, he has collected many sources of restricted data from the University of Michigan on its students from the Registrar’s Office, University Housing, the Office of Student Life, Greek Life, Admissions, Financial Aid, and has merged these to restricted data from the College Board on high school characteristics. Mickey’s dissertation, “The Unintended Consequences of Affirmative Action Bans,” draws upon a wide variety of data sources mentioned above. His previous work has been published in the American Journal of Education and the Journal of Higher Education, and has been featured by The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and National Public Radio.
