Chelsea Jones

Dr. Chelsea N. Jones is a Researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice, specializing in the intersection of systemic racism, electoral policy and gender inequity. Her work is driven by a commitment to advance policies that increase the political power of marginalized communities and support the economic advancement and physical wellbeing of women of color. At the Brennan Center, she conducts mixed methods research highlighting the disparate impacts of restrictive policies on these communities.

Before joining the Brennan Center, Dr. Jones served as a Senior Policy Fellow at the UCLA Voting Rights Project, where her political geography research was used in voting rights court cases nationwide. Dr. Jones has also contributed her expertise to the National League of Cities, conducting equity analyses on local government policies, and she has served as a Fellow for the U.S. House of Representatives and Texas’ Health and Human Services Commission.

She earned her doctorate in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a dissertation focused on the role of sociocultural institutions, like the Black Church, in countering voter suppression. She is also a proud alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin and Carnegie Mellon University.

Her research has been published in the Washington Post and by Routledge and has been cited by news outlets nationally. But most important of all, she’s a southern girl, with a desire to reinvest in the communities that built her.