Bio

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. I mostly work on issues related to spatial inequality, climate hazards, and schools. In my dissertation, I focus on my home state of North Carolina to explore how the changing climate influences spatial inequalities in educational opportunity through mechanisms such as unequal disruptions to schooling, differential rates of residential or school displacement, and uneven recoveries to natural disasters across places. I am a member of the Center for Education Policy Analysis and the Changing Cities Research Lab.

Research

Activities, Schools, and Segregation

Much of my research examines on spatial inequality in the twenty-first century. In a recent paper, I investigate whether activity spaces – the places where people work, recreate, worship, shop, etc. – relate to school enrollments in Los Angeles, where school choice is prevalent. I find that families are more likely to enroll in schools near previous activities, and that segregating activities predict segregating school enrollments. In a review article, Jackelyn Hwang and I discuss scholarship on the persistence of racial residential segregation amidst neighborhood change. We outline three mechanisms that perpetuate these processes: resource inequalities, enduring ethnoracial hierarchies, and consolidated institutional power.

Climate Disasters and Spatial Inequalities in Education

My dissertation considers how climate disasters relate to spatial inequalities in education. Using statewide student records from North Carolina, fine-grain flooding information, and other demographic and geographic data, I look at the impacts of hurricane flooding on student mobility patterns through homes and schools, what these mean for broader patterns of segregation, and how repeated exposure to disasters affects academic progression.

In a descriptive paper, I find a loose coupling between flood risks in students’ homes and schools. In other words, most students who experience flooding in one of these settings do not experience flooding in the other setting. This is likely driven by small-scale differences in geographic features, floodplain management, and land development. As students face increasing risks of disastrous flooding, this finding has implications for efforts to provide shelter and resources to affected populations.

Next, I investigate student mobility in North Carolina following hurricane flooding and the implications for ethnoracial segregation in homes and schools. While several studies have found that climate disasters are associated with demographic change, there is little empirical evidence of whether and how these events are linked to residential and school segregation.

I also explore the effects of repeated climate hazards on academic outcomes. Two storms - Hurricanes Matthew and Florence - hit Eastern North Carolina in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Some students were affected by both storms, while some were affected by only one. By comparing these students’ attendance and learning outcomes over time, I measure potential “cumulative disadvantages” of repeated exposure to climate hazards.

In my final dissertation paper, I measure post-disaster school enrollment trajectories and compositional changes. For this analysis, I include schools outside of North Carolina to assess broader disaster recovery trends.

A closed school in Jones County, NC (2022).

Other Inequalities

I am also interested in other ways to assess social processes of inequality. In a new paper Florencia Torche, Alisa Feldman, and I assess marital surname choices using natality records from the state of New Jersey. We find evidence for doing gender, with both hypergamous couples - those in which the husband has higher status than the wife - and hypogomous couples - those in which the wife has more status - being more likely to make conventional surname choices than their homogomous peers.

Teaching

I designed and taught a course called Analytics for a Changing Climate: Introduction to Social Data Science. The course introduces students to R and to data science more broadly, using examples from environmental justice and climate science. Please reach out if you would like to use any course materials or collaborate!

I have also served as a teaching assistant for classes such as:

• Computational Social Science
• Economic Sociology
• Social Psychology
• Statistics

I regularly teach with the Stanford Jail and Prison Education Program.

Data and Materials

I wrote a helper function for loading Common Core Data from NCES’ Elementary and Secondary Information System. You can find the function here.

A replication package for my paper on activity spaces and school enrollments is available here.

A replication package for descriptive analyses on metropolitan residential racial segregation between 1980-2020 is available here.