Margaret M. C. Thomas
Assistant Professor
Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Margaret M. C. Thomas studies the well-being of economically marginalized individuals and families through the lens of policy causes and solutions to material hardship and poverty. She examines material hardship and its consequences for other domains of well-being and analyzes policy impacts on poverty and hardship. She is a co-principal investigator on a multi-year, randomized controlled trial testing the effects of guaranteed income receipt on material hardship and other domains of well-being.
Her scholarship has been published in Child Maltreatment, Journal of Marriage and Family, Pediatrics, and Social Service Review. She was recognized for her outstanding dissertation research by the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the Society for Social Work and Research.
Thomas received a BA in history from the University of Notre Dame, an MSW from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a PhD from Boston University School of Social Work. Previously, she was an assistant professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles Luskin School of Public Affairs, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Columbia School of Social Work, and a practicing social worker.