Elizabeth Jacobs

Elizabeth Jacobs serves as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where she investigates how state, corporate, and academic institutions shape the economic, social, and spatial mobility of immigrants and refugees. Her interdisciplinary research combines computational techniques with qualitative methods to analyze novel data sources and study institutional reproduction of inequality in global contexts.

Her educational background includes a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania (2021), an M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University (2015), and a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (2013).

Dr. Jacobs' research interests focus on migration, race, gender, labor, and education, with particular attention to policies that produce differential outcomes across these domains. Her work examines how migration policies shape global talent flows, the occupational value of U.S. education for immigrants, and the internationalization of higher education. She employs both computational techniques and qualitative methods to construct and analyze novel data sources for studying institutional inequality.

Before joining UConn, Dr. Jacobs held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany and Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service and McCourt School of Public Policy. She maintains secondary academic appointments as a Research Affiliate at Brown University Population Studies and Training Center, a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and a Research Affiliate at the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center.

Dr. Jacobs has collaborated extensively with international organizations including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva and the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. She has presented her research at prominent institutions such as the Institut national d'études démographiques (INED) in Paris, the German Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB), and the University of Oxford's Centre on Migration, Policy and Society.