Elijah Knaap, Ph.D | @knaaptime

I am an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California-Irvine, where I am a faculty affiliate with the Center for Population Inequality and Policy and the Institute for Transportation Studies. 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. I have published widely on topics including segregation, neighborhood effects, fair housing policy, gentrification, spatial econometrics, economic geography, public health, and urban modeling.

As a result, I develop and maintain several widely-used open-source software packages for spatial statistics, neighborhood dynamics, and segregation analysis. This work advances the state of spatial data science to inform urban policy, planning, and social science with rigorous, reproducible, spatially-explicit methods.

My work in both methodological development and applied analytics has received financial support from NSF, NIH, HUD, the Urban Institute, the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners Inc., the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, among others.

Apart from teaching and research at UCI, I lead the development of geosnap, the Geospatial Neighborhood Analysis Package; I serve currently as the Treasurer of the Northeastern Regional Science Association, a core developer and steering committee member for the Python Spatial Analysis Library, and a lead developer at QuantEcon. I am also an affiliate at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education.