Elizabeth Jacobs
Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Connecticut
Dr. Elizabeth Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, USA. Her research agenda asks how institutions – state, corporate, and academic – shape the economic, social and spatial mobility of immigrants and refugees. Using computational techniques and qualitative methods, she constructs and analyzes novel data sources to study the institutional reproduction of inequality in global contexts. Her scholarly interests encompass the areas of migration, gender, race, labor, and education, and the policies that produce differential outcomes in these domains. Her work has appeared in Social Forces, International Migration Review, Population and Development Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Higher Education, Frontiers in Sociology, Harvard Data Science Review and International Migration.
Before joining UConn, Liz was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. Before that, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and McCourt School of Public Policy.
Liz is an incoming Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation (2026-2027). She has collaborated with the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees in Geneva, and has presented her work at the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED) in Paris, the Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung (BiB) (German Federal Institute for Population Research), and the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society.
EDUCATION:
Ph.D., Sociology, University of Pennsylvania (2021)
M.A., Sociology, Columbia University (2015)
B.A., Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania (2013)
SECONDARY ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS:
Oxford University, Nuffield College, Visiting Fellow (Oxford, UK)
Brown University Population Studies and Training Center, Research Affiliate (Providence, USA)
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Guest Researcher (Rostock, Germany)
University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center, Research Affiliate (Philadelphia, USA)
