Laura is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the School of Cities and recently completed her PhD in public policy at Cornell University. Her research is focused on housing, neighbourhoods, and local governments. She is especially interested in how policies shape places, and the implications policy decisions have for individual residential mobility decisions and macro-level patterns of segregation and inequality. She is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in sociological and demographic theory who uses quantitative, qualitative, and spatial methods to answer policy-relevant questions.
Prior to her doctoral studies, Laura was a Research Analyst in the Center of Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute, where she worked on a diverse set of policy-relevant projects, including how cities can support mobility from poverty and access to safety net programs. Before working at the Urban Institute, she received a Master of Public Administration from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington and a B.S. in human physiology with a minor in biology from Gonzaga University.