Kendall Riley is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Iowa. Her research examines how the social environment (re)produces health inequalities, with a focus on harnessing quantitative methodology to unmask the structural roots of racial disparities in aging. Kendall’s dissertation, entitled Women’s Aging in the Shadow of the Carceral State, develops a measure of the carceral state to both investigate how states leverage surveillance, punishment, and coercion across state institutions and to evaluate how it shapes Black and White women's unhealthy aging patterns across U.S. states.
Kendall's dissertation has been supported by the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program and the American Society of Criminology’s Ruth D. Peterson Fellowship for Racial and Ethnic Diversity. She is also a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program fellow.