Ian Lundberg

Ian Lundberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University (2021) and an AB in Sociology and Statistics from Harvard College. His research focuses on stratification and inequality, emphasizing computational methods and causal inference to address societal disparities. Lundberg is a faculty organizer of the Inequality Data Science Lab and an affiliate of the California Center for Population Research.

His research interests include quantitative methodology, causal inference frameworks, and the application of machine learning to social science problems. He has developed the gap-closing estimand – a causal approach to evaluate interventions that reduce disparities across social categories such as race, class, and gender. Lundberg also investigates housing policy, eviction prevention, and the predictability of life outcomes through large-scale collaborations.

Awards/Grants include a National Science Foundation grant (2021–2022) for computational tools in income mobility research and recognition from the ASA Methodology Section. His work bridges theory, methodology, and policy, with contributions to sociology, demography, and interdisciplinary data science.

Lundberg’s methodological innovations include R packages like gapclosing, which operationalizes causal decomposition analysis. His recent projects explore adaptive experimentation in conjoint surveys and the origins of unpredictability in life trajectory predictions. He has held prior positions at Cornell University’s Department of Information Science and UCLA’s Sociology Department as a postdoctoral scholar.