He studies educational disparities, social stratification, and the potential for school-based interventions to mitigate inequality. He is particularly interested in understanding the ways in which the impacts of individual interventions vary across local educational contexts, both for insights into basic social processes and as a means to improving educational outcomes. Hanselman received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine and the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.