Scholarship and Biography
Dr. Meschede, Associate Director of the Heller School’s Institute for Economic and Racial Equity (IERE, formerly IASP) at Brandeis University, is a locally and nationally known researcher on housing, homelessness, and racial economic disparity. She has presented and written widely on racial wealth disparities and was selected as Visiting Scholar at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank where she was analyzed local data on race and ethnic wealth holdings. More recently, she began a cross-national project on the impact of extreme wealth disparities in Germany and the US, partnering with colleagues at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) and Berlin’s Humboldt University.
A skilled evaluation researcher, Dr. Meschede partners with local and national organization to bring together different stakeholder groups to improve projects and policies. She has extensive experience researching homelessness in collaboration with Massachusetts' state departments and local communities and is the author of numerous reports and publications those who find themselves without a home. Dr. Meschede worked in Israel and Europe and served on the faculty at the Masters in Public Affairs Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Department of Urban and Environmental Studies and Planning at Tufts University. She received her PhD in Public Policy from the University of Massachusetts..