Meghan O'Neil
Dr. O'Neil is a Research Scholar for the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center. She studies American inequality and is focused on structural disparities in the justice system, housing, and health, particularly by race and ethnicity. Her research collects evidence to support low-cost public policy solutions to close these gaps. She is the primary investigator of a National Science Foundation sponsored study that measures the value of targeting online courts to patients in opioid treatment centers on the following outcomes: (1) justice-system involvement; (2) health; (3) housing; and (4) employment.
O’Neil joins the Moritz College of Law Drug Enforcement and Policy Center from the University of Michigan, where she was a Research Investigator (Institute for Social Research) and trained as a Research Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School and Visiting PhD Student in the Department of Sociology. Her research has included collaboration with courts, supervision agencies, and community-based public health organizations. She earned her PhD at SUNY, Albany in Sociology and MA in Quantitative Methods at Columbia University. While at Columbia University, she interned for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office of Special Narcotics.
She is a 2021-23 recipient of a National Institutes of Health LRP (L32) award for Clinical Researchers from Disadvantaged Backgrounds. She was a 2022 Innovation to Impact Fellow at Yale University and 2022 NIDA Challenge winner, both funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. O’Neil is the first-generation in her family to attend college.