Barbara Kiviat was a program fellow with the Family-Centered Social Policy program at New America. She is a PhD candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how organizations use credit history and other personal information, including digital traces, to allocate important economic resources like jobs, insurance, and credit. She is particularly interested in how such systems are justified and how they may disadvantage certain groups of people. Prior to Harvard, she helped design and launch the U.S. Financial Diaries, a longitudinal study of the economic lives of 235 American families. She holds an MPA from New York University, where she was a David Bohnett Public Service Fellow in New York City’s Office of the Mayor, and an MA in business journalism from Columbia University. Previously, Kiviat covered business and economics as a staff writer at Time magazine. Her work has also appeared in Fortune, Money, The Miami Herald, The Arizona Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reuters, TheAtlantic.com and WashingtonMonthly.com, among other outlets. Her academic research has been supported by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the Tobin Project, and, at Harvard, the Kennedy School’s Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Center for American Political Studies.