I am a social demographer who uses quantitative methods to understand how people unequally experience a public institution (e.g., the school system, law enforcement) due to being grouped into different institutional units (e.g., classrooms, police jurisdictions) that irregularly provide public goods and bads. This involves analyzing large data sets to describe the two closely related sides of this phenomenon: the segregation of populations and the inequality of institutional provisions across institutional boundaries and physical space. To support these endeavors, I develop measures of conceptually precise estimands that inform public policy and emphasize variance to clarify the scope and landscape of important social problems. I shed light on the causes and consequences of segregation and institutional irregularity by drawing from the sociology of race, education, criminology, and urban sociology.
