Megan Kang

Megan is a sociology doctoral candidate at Princeton University. Her research aims to make sense of gun availability & social policy through ethnography and mixed methods.

Megan Kang is PhD candidate at Princeton Sociology, with research interests in crime, firearm availability and policy, street gangs, and community violence interventions. 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 the presence of guns affects everyday life in Chicago’s West Side during a period of unprecedented gun violence rates.

Megan’s research has been published in American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Data in Brief, and has received coverage in NYTimes, Washington Post, 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.

She earned her BA in history and political science from UC Berkeley and a master's degree in public policy from University of Chicago. 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.

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

On the Sideline, Manila, 2010

**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, The BRIDGS Center

Research

ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS:

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:

Other Adults in the New Other America: Improving Survey Measures of Youth’s NonParental Adult Relationships (with Rachel Brown-Weinstock, Sarah Gold and Kathryn Edin), R&R at Journal of Marriage and Family
“Still Trapped In”: Desistance Amidst Changing Gang Structures and Boundaries, Under review
How the Truly Disadvantaged Endure: Trauma and Daily Functioning (with Kathryn Edin, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Timothy Nelson)