Peter Bearman is the founding Director of INCITE, the co-founding director of the Oral History Master of Arts program, and the Jonathan R. Cole Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.

A specialist in network analysis and historical sociology, Bearman has authored over 60 peer-reviewed research publications, in addition to three books: Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640 (ASA Rose Monograph Series, Rutgers University Press, 1993), Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart, with Adam Reich (Columbia University Press, 2018). He has edited several others, including the Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Bearman is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Bearman was awarded the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2007 to investigate the increased prevalence of autism. With J. Richard Udry, Bearman co-designed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which was awarded the 2016 Golden Goose Prize. The recipient of numerous teaching awards, Bearman has chaired over 50 doctoral dissertations in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1986-1998) and Columbia (1998 --).

Bearman leads several INCITE initiatives, including the center’s REALM, Liberal Arts Education, and Understanding Autism projects. In addition to these projects, Bearman is currently working on the analysis of large textual corpora, and linking cognitive social neuroscience to fundamental elements of human social structure, specifically, pair-bonding and balance in small groups.

William McAllister is a Senior Research Fellow at INCITE overseeing the Liberal Arts Education project. McAllister also uses methods of trajectory analysis to study the lives of homeless people and the effects of policies and programs on their lives. He is also analyzing the relationship between experimentally designed research and policymaking and program design and carrying out a long-term study on transformations in the recruitment structure of the U.S. state. His research has appeared in the American Behavioral Scientist, American Journal of Public Health, Social Services Review, among other journals, and has been funded by NSF and NIH, among other government agencies, and by Langeloth and JP Morgan Chase among other foundations and nonprofits.

Van C. Tran is a sociologist whose research and writing broadly focus on the incorporation of Asian and Latino immigrants and their children, as well as its implications for American culture, politics and society. Within this area, his contribution lies in the study of the immigrant second generation (i.e. children of immigrants born in the U.S.) and how ethnic neighborhoods and cultural processes shape social mobility among second-generation Asian and Latino/a Americans.

As an immigration scholar and urban sociologist, his research and teaching are deeply intertwined with the vibrancy and diversity of New York City. He follows a long tradition of scholars who engage with the city as a social laboratory for original research that seeks to inform urban social policy.

His research has been published in both sociology and interdisciplinary journals, including Social Forces, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, City & Community, Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. His scholarship has been recognized with awards from the Section on International Migration, Section on Latino/a Sociology and Section on Community and Urban Sociology of the American Sociological Association.

Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian whose research focuses on the use of oral history in social movements and the politics of urban property. She is the Director of the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University. She consults and lectures widely on oral history education and methods, and is co-author of the "Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide."

Starecheski was a lead interviewer on Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project, for which she interviewed Afghans, Muslims, Sikhs, activists, low-income people, and the unemployed. She is a member of the Core Working Group for Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change, where she facilitates the Practitioner Support Network.

In 2015, she won the Oral History Association’s article award for “Squatting History: The Power of Oral History as a History-Making Practice” and in 2016 she won the Sapiens-Allegra “Will the Next Margaret Mead Please Stand Up?” prize for public anthropological writing.

Starecheski received a PhD in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she was a Public Humanities Fellow. Her book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, was published in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press.

Adam Reich is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He received his PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley in 2012, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar. He is interested in how people understand their class and status positions, the ways these understandings are mediated by the organizations of which they are a part, and how such understandings preserve and, occasionally, unsettle existing inequalities. Reich is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Working for Respect: Conflict and Community at Walmart (Columbia U Press, forthcoming), co-authored with Peter Bearman. He is also the author of several peer-reviewed articles, which have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology and Social Science & Medicine.

Maria Abascal is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. She recently completed a postdoc in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University, and she received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University. Broadly, Maria is interested in intergroup relations and boundary processes, especially as they pertain to race, ethnicity and nationalism. Her work draws on a range of quantitative methods and data sources, including original lab, survey, and field experiments. Her research has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology, among other venues.

Noam Zerubavel is a social and neural scientist interested in understanding human relationships and group interactions. Dr. Zerubavel investigates the organizing sociological principles, psychological processes, and neural mechanisms of the complex dynamics in social networks. His recent neuroimaging work on affective reciprocity postulates that brain activity might predict future friendships. He completed his PhD in psychology with Professor Kevin Ochsner and postdoctoral training in social network analysis with Professor Peter Bearman at Columbia University. He is currently a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University.