Emileigh Harrison

Emileigh Harrison is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Inclusive Economy Lab within the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and a Principal Investigator at the MiiE Lab. Her research focuses on understanding barriers to education (such as financial constraints or beliefs about academic abilities shaped by representation) and the role that education policy can play in eliminating them. Her recent work focuses on applying natural language processing and computer vision tools to measure changes in gender and racial representation in educational content over time. She also examines the impact of higher education policies on social mobility for students from low-income and historically marginalized backgrounds. Her work evaluates a range of policies, such as free community college, articulation agreements, and remedial coursework placement policies.

Harrison received her PhD from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy where she completed the Econometrics and Labor Economics fields.

She has held multiple prestigious fellowships, including the 2023 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow, Discovery Doctoral Fellow at the Data Science Institute and a Committee on Education Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Harrison is a first generation college student and a community college alumna who is dedicated to mentoring students with similar backgrounds. She was the inaugural Co-Chair of the First Generation Education Scholars AEFP Community Group along with Susan Dynarski.