Academic Profile

Research Interests: Migration, violence, inequality, causal inference, computational social science 

Arun Frey is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science in the Department of Sociology, and a non-stipendiary research fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. 

In his research, Arun applies computational methods to the areas of violence, migration, and inequality. He has written on how immigration affects all aspects of human interactions; from everyday behaviour—such as where to buy or rent property—to subtle changes in attitude and mental wellbeing, to outright anti-immigrant attacks and hostility. A study on the latter topic was recently awarded with the 2021 ESR Best Article of the Year Award.

His research on the impact of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic has had a documented impact on policy in several countries and invited hearings at the European Commission, the OECD, and the World Bank. It recently featured in Altmetric's list of Top 100 articles of 2021.

Arun holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Oxford. In 2020, he was based at Harvard University's Department of Sociology as a Visiting Fellow.