NEWS
July 2026
Welcome, Saad!
Saad Mohammad Abrar is joining the lab as a postdoctoral scholar. Coming from a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, his work asks whether mobility and behavioral data — and the models built from them — are actually reliable, fair, and valid for high-stakes public decision-making.
July 2026
New Paper in Nature: New Deal mortgage programs benefited white borrowers disproportionately
Our paper with Kate Thomas, Thomas Storrs, and Jacob Faber came out in Nature. Using newly digitized archival records from FHA and VA mortgage programs, we show just how lopsidedly these New Deal-era programs channeled homeownership and wealth toward white borrowers.
July 2026
New Paper in Housing Policy Debate: Where did they go after HOPE VI?
Our HOPE VI paper came out in Housing Policy Debate. Using individual residential histories from 1980 to 2021, we follow displaced Chicago public housing residents to see where they actually ended up — and whose promises of "better" neighborhoods held up over time.
July 2026
A New Picture of Segregation is live
Our interactive site for the National Experienced Racial-Ethnic Diversity (NERD) dataset just went live. Explore where and when people across the U.S. actually encounter diversity, tract by tract.
July 2025
New home at UC Santa Barbara
I joined the Department of Geography at UC Santa Barbara this summer as Assistant Professor in GIScience and Urban Data Science!
August 2024
NSF Grant: Measuring Integration in Affordable Housing with Location Data
Bernadette Baird-Zars and I were awarded a $400,000 NSF grant to test whether affordable housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods actually produces the integration policy assumes.
June 2024
New Paper in PNAS: Race, Traffic Citations, and Police Stops
Our paper on race, traffic citations, and police stops came out in PNAS. As far as we know, it's the first road-level look at racial disparities in traffic enforcement using mobility data.
April 2023
Washington Center for Equitable Growth Grant
We received a $70,000 grant from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth (with Jacob Faber, Kate Thomas, and Thomas Storrs) to fill in some of the gaps in the historical record of New Deal-era mortgage programs.
March 2023
NSF Grant: Center for Household Energy and Thermal Resilience (HEaTR)
I joined the NSF-funded Center for Household Energy and Thermal Resilience (HEaTR) as Co-PI. HEaTR looks at how households — especially lower-income ones — experience and adapt to climate-driven heat and cold stress.
March 2023
Missing Pieces in the Puzzle: Leveraging Untapped Archival Data to Connect New Deal Housing Policies to Racial and Spatial Inequality
Jacob Faber, Kate Thomas, Thomas Storrs, and I received a $199,681 Russell Sage Foundation grant to look beyond redlining at how FHA and VA mortgage activity shaped contemporary racial inequality in housing, wealth, and neighborhood attainment.
April 2023
Urban Data Hub Launched at Cornell AAP
I helped launch the Urban Data Hub at Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning — a convening space for people working at the intersection of cities and data.