Her interdisciplinary scholarship treats race, power, and inequality as foundational forces in U.S. political life, rather than as secondary “identity” variables. Across her research agenda, she examines how racial hierarchies shape everyday life, political attitudes, policy preferences, political participation, and coalition-building—especially in the arenas of immigration politics, Latine racial identity, and gendered forms of representation. She pays sustained attention to intersectionality as method and theory—especially to how race, gender, colonialism, and empire shape identities and, in turn, political attitudes and representation. She makes use of mixed methods, both quantitative and qualitative, and black feminist theories to understand the nature of politics. In doing so, she seeks to make visible the ways that exclusion is reproduced and how marginalized communities organize against it. Her scholarship connects social and racial justice to the core operations of American politics: it explains how racial hierarchies are maintained through policy, attitudes, and policy preferences, and it illuminates how marginalized groups organize, claim belonging, and expand representation in ways that can reshape power. 

In 2022, Matos was named a 2022 American Political Science Association Distinguished Junior Scholar in Political Psychology. Matos will be a Russell Sage Visiting Scholar in 2024-2025. Explore Yalidy’s fellowships and awards.

She graduated from The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH with a PhD in Political Science in 2015, and Connecticut College in New London, CT with a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Gender and Women’s Studies, and a minor in English in 2009. Prior to Rutgers, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University. Explore Yalidy’s CV.