I am an associate professor in the sociology department at Johns Hopkins University where I also direct the 21st Century Cities Initiative. My work shows how neighborhood racial and ethnic segregation has evolved since Civil Rights legislation passed in the 1960s. My work shows that, since the turn of the 21st century, segregation now is the result of inaction among White residents who know less about and are less willing to consider moving into racially integrated neighborhoods and, as a result, fail to move into integrated neighborhoods rather than flight out of integrated neighborhoods.

Another area of by work uses innovative methods to measure neighborhood environments. I was among the first scholars to use Google Street View to measure neighborhood environments and have used large-scale datasets to document racial and economic disparities in access to healthy environments, though I’ve also shown that the consequences are sometimes counterintuitive. For example, we showed that adolescent obesity was lower in neighborhoods with more fast food restaurants and then showed that this was due to higher levels of overall commercial investment in neighborhoods rather than exposure to fast food restaurants.

Since coming to Johns Hopkins, I took over leadership of the 21st Century Cities Initiative, a university-wide effort to build internationally recognized innovative and interdisciplinary research on cities and urban environments across Hopkins’ nine divisions. There, I started the Baltimore Area Survey, an annual survey representative of residents in Baltimore City and Baltimore County to gather data useful to scholars, community members, businesses, faith leaders, and government. I also help to lead the Baltimore Social Environmental Collaborative, a $25 million Department of Energy grant to engage community in building a state-of-the-art urban field laboratory to measure climate change and address its consequences on Baltimore.

Before coming to Johns Hopkins, I was on the faculty of the sociology and policy departments at American University. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) and my B.A. in Architecture and Art History from Rice University.

I live in Silver Spring, Maryland with my wife and two daughters. When I’m not working, I enjoy cooking, baking, and swimming.