I am an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California-Irvine. Trained in stratification sociology, urban economics, and quantitative geography, I am a spatial data scientist studying social inequality and spatial structure in neighborhoods, cities, and regions.

My research focuses on urban analytics, spatial policy analysis, and neighborhood dynamics, and my work in both methodological development and applied analytics has received financial support from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Dept of Housing and Urban Development, the Urban Institute, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners Inc., the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, among others.

As a result, I have published widely on topics including segregation, neighborhood effects, fair housing policy, gentrification, economic geography, public health, and urban modeling. I also develop and maintain several open-source software packages for spatial statistics, neighborhood dynamics, and segregation analysis. The goal of this work is to advance the state of spatial data science and inform urban policy, planning, and social science with rigorous, reproducible, spatially-explicit methods.

Apart from research and teaching at UCI, I lead the development of geosnap, the Geospatial Neighborhood Analysis Package; I serve currently on the North American Regional Science Council, Secretary of the Northeastern Regional Science Association, a core developer and steering committee member for the Python Spatial Analysis Library (PySAL), and a lead developer at QuantEcon. I am also an affiliate at the Center for Open Geographical Science at SDSU, and the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education at UMD.