about

Megan Comfort is a senior fellow and founding member of RTI’s Transformative Research Unit for Equity (TRUE) and affiliated faculty in the Division of Prevention Science at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her work centers on understanding pathways to promote equity, justice, and wellbeing for people involved with the criminal legal system and their loved ones. Megan was the recipient of the 2024 Peterson-Krivo Mentoring Award, jointly awarded by the Crime, Law, and Deviance and the Sociology of Law sections of the American Sociological Association. She co-designed with Monica Sheppard TRUE’s Emerging Equity Scholars program and is strongly invested in mentoring early-career researchers, including students who are the first in their family to attend college, family members of incarcerated people, and scholars who have been involved with the criminal legal system.

Megan has extensive experience in qualitative methods and conducting community-based research on topics such as the repercussive effects of incarceration on family relationships, the health care needs of women navigating intersectional disadvantage, and how systems perpetuate and intensify structural racism. She has been principal investigator, multiple principal investigator, or co-investigator on numerous studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that combine qualitative and quantitative methods. She also has led the qualitative component of projects funded by Arnold Ventures and the MacArthur Foundation evaluating innovative approaches to decreasing the use of jails by diverting people from incarceration and increasing the use of pretrial release.

Megan is the author of Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and a co-author with Tasseli McKay, Christine Lindquist, and Anupa Bir of Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry (University of California Press, 2019). Her work has been published in Criminal Justice and Behavior, Ethnography, the Journal of Sex Research, Annual Review of Law & Social Science, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, PLoS ONE, and AIDS & Behavior, among other journals, and also has appeared in journals in Brazil, Argentina, France, and Portugal.

Megan began her career working for Centerforce, a non-profit organization that provides advocacy and support services for people who are incarcerated and their loved ones.  While at Centerforce, she was the Director of Women's Services at The House at San Quentin, a center located just outside the gates of San Quentin State Prison that provides child care, clothing exchange, and other services to anyone coming to visit people held in the prison. As a sociology graduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Megan returned to San Quentin to conduct an ethnographic study of women visiting their partners for her dissertation research.    

From 2002-2011, Megan conducted research funded by the National Institutes of Health with colleagues at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), first as a research specialist (2002-2007) and then as an Assistant Professor (2007-2011).  In collaboration with Olga Grinstead Reznick and others, she designed, implemented, and evaluated the first HIV-prevention program specifically for women with male partners who were incarcerated.  Megan joined RTI International in 2011, continues to have an affiliated faculty appointment with UCSF's Division of Prevention Sciences in the Department of Medicine, and is a member of the UCSF Aging Research in Criminal Justice Health (ARCH) network.

Megan believes in strengthening the policy and programmatic relevance of research, and is a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.  In line with her commitment to social justice, she has served as an advisory board member for Essie Justice Group, a non-profit organization that aims to empower women with incarcerated loved ones and end mass incarceration.  She currently serves on the advisory board of UnCommon Law, a non-profit organization that supports people navigating California’s discretionary parole process through trauma-informed legal representation, mental-health counseling, legislative and policy advocacy, and in-prison programming led by those who have been through the parole process themselves.