W. Carson Byrd is an Associate Research Scientist in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education in the University of Michigan’s Marsal Family School of Education. He also currently serves as the Faculty Associate Director of the Research Analysis & Data Integration Office (RADIO) in the Office of the Vice President for Research,  an Adjunct Associate Professor of Sociology (by courtesy), and holds affiliations with the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics, the Education Policy Initiative in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging.

His research examines the mechanisms of racial stratification and racism in higher education and society, science and knowledge production, the education-health gradient, and critical computational and quantitative approaches for improving the study of social inequalities. His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation, among others.

Dr. Byrd is the author of Behind the Diversity Numbers: Achieving Racial Equity on Campus, Poison in the Ivy: Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses, and co-editor of Intersectionality and Higher Education: Identity and Inequality on College Campuses. His work appears in the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Du Bois Review, Educational Researcher, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, PLoS One, Review of Higher Education, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, among others.