Grace completed her PhD in sociology at Princeton, graduating early with the Dean’s Completion Fellowship. She joined Northwestern Kellogg’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab as a postdoctoral fellow in Fall 2023.

Much of Grace’s research intersects the economy and culture. Her early work examined the impact of cultural and religious ethics on business management practices in China. Grace’s dissertation examined the emergence of early-stage organizations—tech startups—at the nexus between the U.S. and China and how these early-stage firms and entrepreneurial actors must navigate transnational contexts as well as locale-specific challenges, such as regulatory constraints, in an autocratic context. Her recent work, in the process of data collection, draws on the framework of racial capitalism to study the development of local economies and entrepreneurship in economically stressed urban and rural communities.

Grace employs mixed methods in her research, using a combination of ethnography, interview, archival and survey data. She has conducted fieldwork across cities in the U.S. and China since 2012 and has worked in a number of entrepreneurial and investment-related contexts in addition to freelance consulting on the side for early-stage startup founders across a range of industries.

Her research has been supported by the Kauffman Foundation, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton’s Center on Contemporary China, Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion, and Princeton’s Center for the Study of Social Organizations, among others. Her work has also been awarded by the American Sociological Association’s economic sociology section.

Prior to her time at Princeton, Grace studied politics and economics at Wellesley College and taught in northwest Baltimore through the Teach For America program.