Biography

I’m a demographer/sociologist studying the political economy of housing and population health. My interdisciplinary quantitative research is organized around two central tenets of sociology: context and explanation. Contemporary contexts and outcomes are the function of cumulative, historical exposures. I use relational sociology to inform quantitative analyses of place, race, and class, focusing on the entangled, reciprocal systems of social and economic reproduction. My research is driven by a commitment to applying theory-driven quantitative methods to real-world problems in a way that is transparent, reproducible, and motivated by a need to address the fundamental causes of social and health inequity in the United States.

My dissertation work uses causal mediation analysis to answer relational questions about the role of place in producing racialized inequality across the life-course, including the long-run consequences of racist housing policies on outcomes related to household wealth and individual health. Quantitative methods must meet the nuance and detail of theory-driven research questions. I believe that hypotheses about complex social exposures, expanded by critical theorists and qualitative scholars, are often flattened by conventional quantitative methods. These dissertation projects involve developing new observational methods in g-computation for multiple dependent mediators, which I’m in the process of publishing as a public R package.

I’m also working on a set of simulation and data fusion methods for creating robust small-area estimates in the United States, combining ACS data with other national surveys such as the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. This includes funded collaborations with Data for Progress, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and the EPA. I co-authored several policy briefs using this work for the Data for Progress Green New Deal platform, Senator Nikil Saval’s COVID-19 platform, and Congressman Jamaal Bowman’s Green New Deal for Schools platform.

At Princeton’s Eviction Lab, I’m working on several projects related to the rental housing market, displacement, social programs, and health outcomes. Many of these projects are in close collaboration with the Census Bureau, where we are linking individual eviction records to restricted-use data on welfare enrollment, employment, and mortality. This work situates racialized housing inequality as a fundamental cause of population health disparities, focusing on profiteering, exploitation, and power relations between specific actors (e.g., landlords and tenants).

My academic work in these areas is published or forthcoming in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Forces, Nature, Spatial Demography, Sociological Methodology, the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, the New England Journal of Medicine, and elsewhere.

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