BIOGRAPHY
Elizabeth Roberto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the founding Co-Director of the Center for Computational Insight on Inequality and Society at Rice University (CIISR). She has broad research interests in social and spatial inequality, a substantive focus on residential segregation, and methodological expertise in computational social science and quantitative methods. Her research uses innovative methods to examine the complex relationship between the social and built environment of cities. Dr. Roberto received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. She was awarded a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in Studying Complex Systems, which supported her postdoctoral research at Princeton University. Her research has also been supported by the American Sociological Association and the National Academies, and she is the recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Roberto, Elizabeth, Yu Zhu, Santiago Segarra, and Jaleh Jalili. 2025. “Counterfactual Road Networks: A Method for Examining Social and Spatial Division in Road Networks.” Sociological Methodology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00811750251382926
Law, Tina, and Elizabeth Roberto. 2025. “Generative Multimodal Models for Social Science: An Application with Satellite and Streetscape Imagery.” Sociological Methods & Research 54(3): 889-932. https://doi.org/10.1177/00491241251339673
Korver-Glenn, Elizabeth, Elizabeth Roberto, Leah Binkovitz, and Sarah Mayorga. 2024. “Barriers and Boundaries: Built Environments, Meaning-Making, and Race-and-Income Segregation.” Sociological Perspectives 67(4-6): 261-288. https://doi.org/10.1177/07311214241274159
Roberto, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn. 2021. "The Spatial Structure and Local Experience of Residential Segregation." Spatial Demography 9: 277-307. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-021-00086-7
Hwang, Jackelyn, Elizabeth Roberto, and Jacob Rugh. 2019. “Residential Segregation in the Twenty-First Century and the Role of Housing Policy,” In How Public Policy Impacts Racial Inequality, edited by Josh Grimm and Jaime Loke. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.
Roberto, Elizabeth. 2018. “The Spatial Proximity and Connectivity Method for Measuring and Analyzing Residential Segregation.” Sociological Methodology 48(1): 182-224. https://doi.org/10.1177/0081175018796871 (https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/sm2018feature.pdf)