Elly Field

• July 2026: My first-authored article, "The Coupled Dynamics of Neighborhood and School Change," is out now in the American Journal of Sociology.

• July 2025: My sole-authored article "Understanding the ‘Package Deal’: Disentangling Parents’ Intertwined Preferences for Schools and Neighborhoods" is now online at Social Forces.

I am a quantitative sociologist and methodologist working at the intersection of stratification, education policy, and spatial demography. I am interested in how inequality is generated and reproduced through the dynamic interactions between institutional structures and individual-level decisions. My research agenda is driven by the overarching questions: how do social policies influence the choices available to individuals, and how those choices aggregate to shape inequality? I am currently an NICHD postdoctoral fellow at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2024 and previously completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Brown University Population Studies and Training Center.

In my ongoing research, I study how the structural link between schools and neighborhoods created by school district policies shapes racial segregation in both contexts. Specifically, I explore how school policies and choice landscapes shape parents’ decisions about where to live and where to send their children to school, and I identify the implications of those decisions for neighborhood and school segregation. I investigate these questions at multiple levels of analysis, from the individual-level choices parents make to the aggregate patterns of how schools and neighborhoods experience racial turnover over time. My work informs sociological theory on population dynamics, racial segregation, and educational inequality, and I reveal how social policies can create spillover effects across domains. 

My research has been published in American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Demography, and Public Administration Quarterly. 

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development Postdoctoral and Graduate Training Fellowships, and the American Sociological Association/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, as well as several competitive awards, grants, and fellowships at the University of Michigan and Brown University.