Geoffrey Wodtke

Geoffrey Wodtke is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility. He holds multiple committee appointments including the Committee on Quantitative Methods in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences, the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization, and the Committee on Education. Additionally, he is a Research Associate at the Population Research Center and a Faculty Affiliate with the Program in Computational Social Science.

Wodtke earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2014, where he also completed an M.A. in Statistics in 2011. His undergraduate education began at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before transferring to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his B.A. in Sociology with a concentration in analysis and research.

His research program spans four interconnected areas: neighborhood effects and urban poverty, group conflict and racial attitudes, class structure and income inequality, and methods of causal inference in observational research. Wodtke's work on neighborhood effects has particularly focused on the temporal and developmental dimensions of how neighborhood poverty impacts child development, with findings suggesting more severe effects than previously documented, especially during adolescence for children from poor families.

His recent publications reveal a clear trajectory from substantive neighborhood effects research toward increasingly sophisticated causal methodology development. This evolution includes integrating machine learning approaches with traditional causal inference frameworks, as seen in his forthcoming work on "Deep Learning with DAGs." His methodological contributions focus on handling treatment-induced confounding and developing regression-with-residuals approaches for causal mediation analysis.

• Leo Goodman Award for contributions to sociological methodology (2020)
• Reviewer Award, Sociology of Education (2016)
• Mark Chesler Award for best graduate student paper (2014)
• Student Paper Award honorable mention (2011)
• Jane Addams Award for best article (2011)

Wodtke has secured significant research funding including a $300,264 NSF grant for "Why Neighborhoods Matter" (2020-2023) and an $87,819 SSHRC Canada grant for "Neighbourhoods, Schools, and Environmental Health Hazards" (2018-2022). He has advised numerous graduate students and developed specialized courses on causal mediation analysis. Wodtke co-hosts The Inequality Podcast produced by the Stone Center and has developed several software packages for causal inference including MedFlow, RcGNF, cGNF, and RWRMED.