Meghan M. O'Neil, Ph.D.

Dr. O'Neil is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. She studies American inequality and is focused on structural disparities in the justice system, housing, and health, particularly by race and ethnicity. Her research collects evidence to support low-cost public policy solutions to close these gaps. She was the primary investigator of a National Science Foundation sponsored experiment (NSF 2017068, 2020-23’) that measured the value of targeting online courts to patients in opioid treatment centers on the following outcomes: (1) justice-system involvement; (2) health; (3) housing; and (4) employment. Her scholarship has been published top public health, sociolegal and criminal justice journals such as Criminal Justice & Behavior, Health & Justice, BMC Public Health. She is a 2025-27’ recipient of the National Institutes of Health LRP (L32) award for Clinical Researchers from Disadvantaged Backgrounds. She was selected as a 2022 Innovation to Impact Fellow at Yale University and 2022 NIDA Challenge winner, both funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She enjoys interdisciplinary evidence-based work and is currently collaborating with engineers on the development of software and hardware to improve outcomes for people under government supervision.

O’Neil was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Moritz College of Law, Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at The Ohio State University. She spent five years at University of Michigan where she was a Research Investigator (Institute for Social Research) and trained as a Research Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School and Visiting PhD Student in the Department of Sociology. Her research has included collaboration with courts, supervision agencies, and community-based public health organizations. She earned her PhD at SUNY, Albany in Sociology and MA in Quantitative Methods at Columbia University. While studying at Columbia University, she interned for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office of Special Narcotics and was a fellow at International House of NYC.

Dr. O’Neil is the first-generation in her family to attend college and the granddaughter, daughter, and sister of US wartime veterans. She lives in Michigan with her family and labrador retriever.