Alethia Jones currently serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University at Albany (SUNY), with a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science. Professor Jones earned MA and Ph.D. degrees in Political Science at Yale University (2005). She studies how public policy integrates immigrant communities into US society. Her book manuscript, From Liability to Asset: Immigrant Social Networks and the Politics of Community Banking, 1900-2000, identifies how new laws targeted immigrant social networks and transformed them into policy tools that linked immigrants to government regulated financial institutions, such as credit unions, neighborhood banks and Fannie Mae. Professor Jones has received research fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Virginia, and the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics (Yale University). She served as senior research associate for the Community Renaissance Fellows Program, a HUD-funded comprehensive community development program headquartered at Yale University. Her primary teaching and research interests are in the fields of urban and ethnic politics, public policy and American political development
Professor Jones’s work blends the world of practice with research and teaching. Prior to attending Yale, she served as lead policy staff to a member of the New York City Council. She managed a policy portfolio that included health, housing, welfare and transportation policy initiatives, with attention to the impact on Brooklyn’s Caribbean immigrant population. During her graduate career her consulting and research activities included projects in Boston, Chicago, Miami, New York, New Haven, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
At Rockefeller College she is affiliated with the Center for Women in Government and Civil Society. She teaches courses in policy analysis, bureaucratic politics and immigrant policy.
