at princeton, morning was a student at the office of population research, and her first research projects focused on the uses of racial classification in demographic data like censuses. in particular, she undertook quantitative analyses of the classification of groups that did not easily fit traditional american racial categories, such as mixed-race people and people of south asian descent. with time, she developed an interest in individuals’ beliefs about the nature of racial difference, using the term “racial conceptualization” to get at the web of their interrelated beliefs about which groups constituted races, what demarcated them from each other, how they emerged, and how an individual’s membership in a racial group could be ascertained. her doctoral dissertation explored such concepts using qualitative data, and went on to win the american sociological association’s dissertation award in 2005. in 2011, it was published by the university of california press as "the nature of race: how scientists think and teach about human difference".