Biography

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation. I work at the intersection of population health, urban sociology, and political economy.

My primary research focus has been revealing the mechanisms through which the housing market entrenches racial inequalities in health. While it’s well known that structural inequalities shape population health, I’ve developed new data and tools to isolate and quantify specifically how factors like redlining, eviction, and housing costs create cumulative disadvantage—and the ways in which different actors profit from these arrangements. Throughout all my work, I use relational sociology to inform analyses of place, race, and class, aligning cutting-edge quantitative methods with careful attention to historical scholarship and causal inference debates. My academic work in these areas is published or forthcoming in Social Forces, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Social Science & Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and elsewhere.

I’m also an active member of the Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank developing research on the climate and inequality nexus. This work includes collaborations with housing and labor organizers, policymakers, and federal agencies. I’m interested in communicating sociological perspectives to external audiences and building coalitions across academics, policymakers, journalists, and the public.

Download my CV, which links to PDFs of all my publications.