Maria Kefalas  earned her BA at Wellesley College and worked at the Brookings Institution before completing her MA and PHD at the University of Chicago in Sociology.  She held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and taught at Barnard College prior to joining the faculty at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia where she serves as Director of the Institute for Violence Research and Prevention and  is an Associate Professor in Sociology.  Her work covers a wide array of interests:  inequality, the family, culture, and cities and communities. The author of two books Working-Class Heroes (California 2003) and Promises I Can Keep (with Kathryn Edin) (California 2005, recipient of the 2006 William J. Goode Book Award), her newest book, titled Hollowing out the Middle, with Patrick Carr, is based on research sponsored by the Network while the she and Carr conducted fieldwork in rural Iowa. In Hollowing, Carr and Kefalas will argue that the greatest threat to the nation's Heartland will be the loss of the region's most precious resource: its young people.