About
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 substantive focus on residential segregation and methodological expertise in computational social science and quantitative methods.
A central idea animates her research agenda: space is not a passive container for social life but an active mechanism through which inequality is structured and reproduced. The infrastructure of a city both connects and divides. It shapes our proximity to schools and jobs, who we know and how we’re perceived, and it builds advantage and disadvantage into the city’s physical fabric.
Dr. Roberto develops theoretically grounded methods for studying spatial inequality that make structural processes analytically visible, and she applies them to fundamental questions about how segregation and inequality are spatially organized, physically embedded in the built environment, and produced across multiple geographic scales.
In recent work, she examines how physical barriers — including highways, fences, railroad tracks, and dead-end streets — divide nearby neighborhoods. Such barriers are associated with heightened racial residential segregation and are experienced both as obstacles to social interaction and as symbolic markers of social division.
Her research is supported by a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and has previously been supported by the American Sociological Association, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation, through a Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in Studying Complex Systems.
Her work appears in Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Methods & Research, and Social Science & Medicine, among other journals. Her research has been recognized with the Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize from Yale University.
Dr. Roberto received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University and a B.A. and M.P.A. from George Washington University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, and previously held positions at the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Brookings Institution, and the Government Accountability Office.