Elizabeth Roberto

Elizabeth Roberto is a sociologist at Rice University studying residential segregation, the built environment, and spatial inequality using computational methods.

Dr. Elizabeth Roberto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rice University, the founding Co-Director of the Center for Computational Insights on Inequality and Society (CIISR), and the Director of the Spatial Inequality Lab. Her research examines the complex relationship between the social and built environment of cities, with a focus on residential segregation and computational social science.

Aerial satellite image of a highway and rail corridor dividing two residential neighborhoods, with a red line marking the severed street connection — Figure from *Generative Multimodal Models for Social Science*, Sociological Methods & Research (2025).

News

2026 Invited talk, “The Infrastructure of Inequality,” Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame (September 4)
2026 Honorable Mention, Jane Addams Article Award, American Sociological Association Section on Community and Urban Sociology, for “Counterfactual Road Networks”
2026 “Integrating or Segregating? Gentrification, the Changing City-Suburb Divide, and Black Exceptionalism” (with Jackelyn Hwang, Francine I. Stephens, and Jacob Rugh) forthcoming in Social Forces
2026 Invited talk, “The Infrastructure of Inequality,” Broom Center for Demography, University of California, Santa Barbara (June 1)
2026 “Counterfactual Road Networks” published in Sociological Methodology
2025 “Generative Multimodal Models for Social Science” published in Sociological Methods & Research