Elizabeth Jacobs

Dr. Elizabeth Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on how institutional policies—state, corporate, and academic—affect the economic, social, and spatial mobility of immigrants and refugees. She employs computational and qualitative methods to analyze novel data sources, studying the institutional reproduction of inequality in global contexts. Her work bridges migration studies, race, gender, labor markets, and education policy.

Education:

• Ph.D., Sociology, University of Pennsylvania (2021)
• M.A., Sociology, Columbia University (2015)
• B.A., Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania (2013)

Her research explores migration policies' impacts on global talent circulation, skilled migrant labor markets, and the gendered outcomes of international education. She has collaborated with UNHCR, the Migration Policy Institute, and institutions like the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Her recent publications analyze return migration, refugee flow forecasting, and the role of organic data in migration studies.

Labs/Teams: Affiliated with Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and University of Pennsylvania’s Population Studies Center. Her work emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration across demography, computational social science, and policy analysis.