I am currently at the University of Chicago, where I am a Postdoctoral Scholar/Mansueto Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and an affiliated researcher with the UChicago Consortium on School Research. I am currently collaborating with UChicago faculty, including Geoff Wodtke and Nicole Marwell, on projects related to environmental toxins as a driver of neighborhood effects on, and racial inequality in, children’s cognitive development and on the effects of Chicago Connected, a broadband subsidy program, on low-income Chicago Public School children’s school outcomes amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Before UChicago, I completed a Ph.D. in Sociology & Social Policy at Harvard University, where I was also a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and a Meyer Fellow in the Joint Center for Housing Studies, as well as an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

My research examines whether and how neighborhoods, schools, and childcare settings mediate the intergenerational transmission of skills and status. To this end, I draw on literature from urban sociology, inequality/stratification, sociology of education, public policy, and spatial analysis and use my hometown of Los Angeles as a theoretically strategic case. My sole- and coauthored papers, described below, have been published in Demography, Journal of Health & Social Behavior, American Educational Research Journal, Annual Review of SociologyRSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and Urban Affairs Review.

Dissertation: Contextual Selection and Intergenerational Reproduction

What began as the first chapter of my dissertation was published in Demography  as a coauthored article exploring skill-based neighborhood sorting in Los Angeles County, with Robert J. Sampson: https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/57/2/675/168010/Skill-Bas....

Subsequent chapters examine the link between parental depression and contextual selection (Journal of Health & Social Behavior: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00221465211001058), minority avoidance via school sorting in the suburbs (R&R), immigrant families' school choice disadvantage and its implications for the nativity-based achievement gap, and whether contemporary school sorting should be conceptualized as a status attainment or intergenerational reproduction process. I am grateful to the National Science Foundation, Joint Center for Housing Studies, Institute for Quantitative Social Science and Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies for funding my project.

Other Projects on Neighborhood, School, and Family Inequality and Change

Beyond my dissertation, I have written two papers on neighborhood income inequality and change, one sole-authored (Urban Affairs Review: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00221465211001058) and the other coauthored, with Robert J. Sampson and Robert D. Mare  (RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences with Robert J. Sampson and Robert D. Mare: https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/3/2/102). The latter paper received extensive coverage in LA Weekly (https://www.laweekly.com/minority-neighborhoods-at-the-bottom-of-l-a-s-economic-ladder-tend-to-stay-there/). Another paper, with Geoffrey T. Wodtke and Sagi Ramaj (R&R), examines the effects of neighborhood environmental inequality on young children's cognitive development. 

I have also coauthored papers on school (ine)quality (American Educational Research Journal with Tracey Lloyd: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0002831220948460) and wealth inequality (Annual Review of Sociology with Alexandra Killewald and Fabian Pfeffer: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-soc-060116-053331). 

Prior to my doctoral studies, I attended Harvard’s Kennedy School, worked at the New York City Department of Education, consulted several national nonprofits, including the United Negro College Fund, Audubon Society, and Women’s World Banking on their social impact strategies, and received a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics & Economics and Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

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