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. 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 a 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 dynamics.  I explore how school policies 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. My work informs sociological theory on population dynamics and reveals how social policies can create spillover effects across domains. 

My work 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.