About me
I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Kennesaw State University. Prior to this faculty appointment, I served as a postdoc at Cornell University in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and I received my Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Washington.
My research focuses on topics of residential segregation, neighborhoods and the changing geography of place-based inequalities, and my work has appeared in peer-reviewed outlets like Demography, Urban Affairs Review and Social Forces. Across my research, I’m a data omnivore and a big proponent of the R language for statistics and data visualization. I especially ❤ ggplot2.
A significant share of my ongoing research harnesses web data scraped from online rental housing platforms like Craigslist to understand the role of these information exchanges within the modern housing search process and extract policy-relevant information about rental housing conditions across the United States. This research is enabled by a unique data collection infrastructure based on many containerized Helena scrapers running within a Kubernetes cluster. My colleagues and I have used these data to:
- assess the degree to which different types of neighborhoods are more or less represented online
- measure differences in discourse about housing between neighborhoods
- describe how different sources capture different market segments