Alex received her undergraduate degree from Barnard College at Columbia University where she majored in Urban Studies and Sociology. Her areas of interest lie in inequality, poverty, race, culture, ethnography, urban sociology, neighborhood effects, and socio-spatial relations with emphasis on the "micro-situational experience of poverty, inequality, intergenerational mobility, and race relations." During her first year at Princeton (2005), she worked with Paul DiMaggio on the Net Neutrality debate which is currently before Congress. She is currently working on questions of suburban poverty and high school to work transitions in the US and Japan {with Professors Katherine Newman and Mary Brinton [Harvard]}.