Professor Rashawn Ray of the Department of Sociology and Professor Sarah Cameron of the Department of History in the College of Arts and Humanities were named among the 28 distinguished scholars and writers named as 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellows. The honor comes with a $200,000 award.

The Carnegie Corporation, a philanthropic organization, provides each fellow with the funding to produce major works or studies over the next two years that contribute to the social sciences or humanities. Sociologist Rashawn Ray and historian Sarah Cameron are the second and third UMD faculty members to receive the honor since its 2015 launch, following history Professor Richard Bell last year.

“I am elated and deeply honored,” said Ray, who is also executive director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research at UMD. “But accordingly, I realize that this is just an additional step to keep doing the work.”

Much of Ray’s recent scholarship—from working with Jigsaw, a unit of Google to develop virtual reality trainings for police officers to studying the impact of Black Lives Matter protests via a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation—concerns police reform; his research earned him an award earlier this year from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

With his Carnegie fellowship, he plans to develop a national database that grades states’ progress on introducing and passing police reform legislation in line with the yet-to-be-passed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Ray's database will live on the website of the Brookings Institution, where he is a fellow and which nominated him for the Carnegie fellowship; it will be accompanied by a policy report, book and op-eds.