Rebecca is a volunteer Fellow with The Lab @ DC, working on projects at the intersection of education, housing, and health. She is an Assistant Professor in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College.
Rebecca’s research studies how social service bureaucracies prioritize amidst limited resources. Her dissertation research examines prioritization in school districts. It shows how districts facing budget pressure use discretion to decide that fewer students fall into prioritized categories and uses computational text analysis of legal cases to show how parents reduce this discretion. Her newer research studies and aids government agencies in using large-scale data and predictive modeling for more equitable prioritization. As a 2018 Summer Fellow with Data Science for Social Good, she and team members collaborated with the NYC Mayor’s Public Engagement Unit to develop a predictive model to prioritize outreach to rental tenants at risk of landlord harassment.
She holds her PhD in Sociology, Social Policy, and Demography at Princeton University, where she was a Graduate Prize Fellow with the Center for Human Values. Before arriving at Princeton, Rebecca received a B.A. in psychology and M.A. focused on political theory from Stanford, and spent two years as a pre-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Department of Bioethics.