I'm Suzanne Wood, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. I'm also a graduate affiliate with the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity (CREO) and a Burns Fellow in the Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research (ND PIER). My research sits at the intersection of education, inequality, and organizational structure, with a focus on how race, class, gender, and power shape the everyday lives of students and teachers in public schools.

Using qualitative methods and critical sociological and organizational frameworks, I investigate how school systems - while professing a commitment to equity - often reflect and reinforce structural inequalities. My dissertation follows four fourth-grade classrooms in a low-income school district facing declining resources, high-stakes accountability, and growing student need, to examine how both teachers and students experience and respond to these pressures on the ground.

This research is grounded in my own journey through the Public K-12 Education System. As a student, I experienced public schooling as alienating and disempowering, graduating with the sense that education wasn't meant for me. And yet, my love of learning endured. I returned to higher education with a drive to understand how education works - and for whom. I hold a B.A. from Columbia University (cum laude) and an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

I'm committed to producing research that makes visible the lived realities of those most impacted by systemic inequity in education, while contributing to conversations about how schools might become more just, inclusive, and humanizing institutions.