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Jessica Kalbfeld is the Director of Research for Public Wise. Her research there centers on democratic access, specifically the relationship between trust in the democratic process and voting propensity. Public Wise is a non-profit organization dedicated to expanding democratic access by working for voting rights. In addition to conducting original research, the organization provides c3 and c4 grants to partner organizations and offers consulting to partners through a Funds+ model.

Jessie earned her doctorate in sociology from New York University in 2021. While at NYU, she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and an inaugural NYU Furman Law Fellow at NYU Law School 2015-2016. Her research interests include race and inequality, neighborhood change, and social control. Some of her recent research projects include an investigation of court reporter mis-transcription of African American English, coauthored with an interdisciplinary team, which was the top downloaded article of spring 2019-2020 in Language; an interrogation of critical mass as it relates to Affirmative Action, just published in the Law & Society Review; and an analysis of complaints made against police in Chicago, co-authored with Jacob Faber published in City & Community. Her dissertation research focused on the impact of racial and socioeconomic neighborhood change on social control in New York City.  Her recent research on court reporters has been covered by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, NPR, Vice News Tonight, Vice Media, Daily KOS, and more.

Jessie has worked as a data consultant for the Southern Poverty Law Center of Mississippi and Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington D.C., among others. She is a founding member of CulturePoint LLC, a research and consulting firm that provides evidence-based approaches to developing leadership and high-performance in organizations through effective management of diverse workforces and development of inclusive environments. CulturePoint is a collective of research-practitioners committed to doing new and innovative research on race, ethnicity, culture, and social inequality, and to bringing their empirical findings to organizations in the form of training and actionable policy recommendations. Through CulturePoint, Jessie has consulted with clients such as the US Navy, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency on organizational metrics for diversity and inclusion, skills for giving public-facing scientific presentations, and cognitive decision making processes in diverse organizations.

You can follow Jessie on twitter @sociologyjones.