The Bloustein School is pleased to announce that at their recent meeting, the Rutgers Board of Governors approved Will Payne and Jermaine Toney as Associate Professors with tenure.
In his research, Will uses quantitative and qualitative methods to study the relationship between geospatial technologies and urban inequality, examining how changing technical capabilities, labor relations, and competitive pressures in the location-based services (LBS) industry interact with processes of racialized and class-based segregation in American cities. He has examined how different groups of urban residents use “urban information systems” like the Zagat Survey, Nextdoor, Yelp, Foursquare, and Google Maps to organize and understand their consumption experiences in cities, while technologists and real estate developers employ the resulting data to help transform marginal neighborhoods into upscale consumption spaces. He also develops open-source tools for spatial data visualization and computational research.
Jermaine’s research focuses on finance, family, and health. An overarching focus of his research is the distribution and stratification of various socio-economic indicators, such as wealth, income, and education. His current work examines the transmission of socioeconomic status across generations, intergroup experiences in accessing credit and asset markets, analytic approaches to measuring the racial wealth gap, how disparities in health affect a household’s financial marketplace participation. He was the recipient of a 2023-2024 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Fellowship on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Economic Outcomes and a member of the 2022-2023 cohort of Early Career Faculty Fellows in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University.
Their promotions are a testimony to the high quality of their work and the ability of the Bloustein School to attract world-recognized scholars.