Rate My Professor Elizabeth Roberto

Elizabeth Roberto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rice University and the founding Co-Director of the Center for Computational Insight on Inequality and Society (CIISR). She earned her Ph.D. with Distinction in Sociology from Yale University in 2015, with a dissertation titled “The Boundaries of Spatial Inequality: Three Essays on the Measurement and Analysis of Residential Segregation.” Her earlier degrees include an M.P.A. in Education and Social Policy in 2002 and a B.A. in Human Services, Cum Laude with Special Honors, in 2000, both from The George Washington University. Before pursuing her doctorate, she served as a Presidential Management Fellow and Research Analyst at the U.S. Department of Transportation, a Research Assistant at the Brookings Institution, and worked at the Government Accountability Office.

Her research examines social and spatial inequality, focusing on residential segregation and the relationship between the social and built environments of cities, using computational social science and quantitative methods. Key publications include “The Spatial Proximity and Connectivity Method for Measuring and Analyzing Residential Segregation” in Sociological Methodology (2018), “Closer to Guns: The Role of Street Gangs in Facilitating Access to Illegal Firearms” in Journal of Urban Health (2018, with Anthony A. Braga and Andrew V. Papachristos), “The Spatial Structure and Local Experience of Residential Segregation” in Spatial Demography (2021, with Elizabeth Korver-Glenn), “Counterfactual Road Networks: A Method for Examining Social and Spatial Division in Road Networks” in Sociological Methodology (2025, with Yu Zhu, Santiago Segarra, and Jaleh Jalili), and “Generative Multimodal Models for Social Science: An Application with Satellite and Streetscape Imagery” in Sociological Methods & Research (2025, with Tina Law). Following her Ph.D., Roberto was a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at Princeton University from 2015 to 2018. She joined Rice University in 2018 and is also a Research Affiliate at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, since 2017. Awards include the NSF CAREER Award, Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize (Yale, 2017), Yale Club of New Haven Scholarship (2008-2015), and American Sociological Association Travel Award. Her projects have received grants from Rice University’s BRIDGE, the National Academies Gulf Research Program, and the Ken Kennedy Institute.