Ashley Vancil-Leap joined the Mississippi State faculty as an Instructor in 2016 after receiving her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri. She is a gender scholar who focuses on the links between culture, identity, labor, food insecurity, and inequalities such as race and class. Her latest work examined the physical and emotional labor of school food service employees in a Midwest city in response to local, state, and national policy changes to school breakfast and lunch programs. Her work can be seen in Advances in Gender Research and Gender Issues.