gerard

Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Columbia University

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I am an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Columbia University and a member of the Data Science Institute. I use causal inference and machine learning methods to study urban inequality, violence, and racial disparities in policing. My work has been published in the American Sociological Review, Child Development, Demography, the Journal of Urban Economics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Social Science & Medicine among other peer-reviewed journals. Findings from my research have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg. I received my PhD in Sociology from New York University in 2019, a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2014, and a BS in Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 2004. Before graduate school, I was a firefighter at Barcelona Fire Department from 2007 to 2011. In my free time, I enjoy running, cycling, and hiking.

 

News and Updates

Sep 2024: The article “Police violence reduces trust in the police among Black residents,” co-authored with Jonathan Ben-Menachem, has been published in PLoS ONE.
Aug 2024: Kara Rudolph and I have been awarded a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the relationship between community-level exposure to aggressive policing and adverse childhood experiences.
Jul 2024: I wrote a chapter for the book Between Us: Healing Ourselves and Changing the World Through Sociology (edited by Marika Lindholm and Elizabeth Anne Wood and published by Chicago University Press) revisiting my time as a firefighter in Barcelona through the lens of sociological concepts.
Jul 2024: The article “Exposure to Crime and Racial Birth Outcome Disparities,” co-authored with Nicholas Mark, has been published in the Journal of Urban Health.
Jun 2024: The article “Neighborhood Safety and Neighborhood Police Violence Are Associated with Psychological Distress among English‐ and Spanish‐Speaking Transgender Women of Color in New York City: Finding from the TURNNT Cohort Study,” co-authored with Dustin Duncan and others, has been published in the Journal of Urban Health.
Jan 2024: I am grateful for the opportunity to join the Russsell Sage Visiting Scholar Class of 2024–2025.
Jun 2023: The study “Understanding Why EmpaTeach Did Not Reduce Teachers’ Use of Violence in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp: A Quantitative Process Evaluation of a School-Based Violence Prevention Intervention,” co-authored with researchers from the Behavioral Insights Team, the International Rescue Committee, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has been published in PLoS Global Public Health.
Mar 2022: The research that Sam Donahue and I are doing on the effects of diversity and peer influences in policing has been awarded a Trustee Grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.
Jan 2022: The article “Declining Violence and Improving Birth Outcomes in the US: Evidence from Birth Certificate Data,” co-authored with Nicholas Mark, has been published in Social Science and Medicine.
Oct 2021: The study “The EmpaTeach Intervention for Reducing Physical Violence from Teachers to Students in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp: A Cluster-Randomised Controlled Trial,” co-authored with researchers from the Behavioral Insights Team, the International Rescue Committee, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has been published in PLoS Medicine.
Feb 2021: My article “Using Machine Learning to Estimate the Effect of Racial Segregation on COVID-19 Mortality in the United States” has been published at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Jul 2020: I started as an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Columbia University.
Jan 2020: My article “Crime and Inequality in Academic Achievement Across School Districts in the United States” has been published in Demography.
Jul 2019: I started as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute.

Recent Publications

PLoS ONE, 2024 (with Jonathan Ben-Menachem)

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Recent high-profile incidents involving the shooting or killing of unarmed Black men have intensified the debate about how police violence affects trust in the criminal justice system, particularly among communities of color. In this article, we propose a quasi-experimental design that leverages the timing of the shooting of Jacob Blake by the Kenosha Police Department relative to when a large survey was fielded in the city of Chicago. We demonstrate that individuals interviewed 4 weeks before …

Journal of Urban Health, 2024 (with Nicholas Mark)

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Urban communities in the United States were transformed at the end of the twentieth century by a rapid decline in neighborhood crime and violence. We leverage that sharp decline in violence to estimate the relationship between violent crime rates and racial disparities in birth outcomes. Combining birth certificate data from US counties with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics from 1992 to 2002, we show that lower crime rates are associated with substantially smaller Black-White …

Journal of Urban Health, 2024 (with Duncan, Dustin, Su Hyun Park, Christoffer Dharma, Jessica Contreras, Roberta Scheinmann, Cristina Herrera, Kim Watson, Denton Callendar, John A. Schneider, Maria Khan, Sahnah Lim, Chau Trihn-Shevrin, and Asa Radix)

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Transgender women of color (TWOC) experience high rates of police violence and victimization compared to other sexual and gender minority groups, as well as compared to other White transgender and cisgender women. While past studies have demonstrated how frequent police harassment is associated with higher psychological distress, the effect of neighborhood safety and neighborhood police violence on TWOC’s mental health is rarely studied. In this study, we examine the association between …

PLOS Global Public Health, 2023 (with Camilla Fabbri, Timothy Powell-Jackson, Katherine Rodrigues, Alexandra De Filippo, Michael Kaemingk, Baptiste Leurent, Elizabeth Shayo, Vivien Barongo, Karen M. Devries)

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EmpaTeach was the first intervention to address teacher violence to be tested in a humanitarian setting and the first to focus on reducing impulsive use of violence, but a cluster randomised trial found no evidence that the intervention was effective in reducing physical and emotional violence from teachers. We aimed to understand why. We conducted a quantitative process evaluation to describe the intervention implementation process (what was implemented and how); examine teachers’ adoption of …

Social Science and Medicine, 2022 (with Nicholas Mark)

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The decline in crime that occurred in the last decade of the 20th century was one of the most important societal changes in recent U.S. history. In this paper, we leverage the sharp decline in violence that began in the 1990’s to estimate the relationship between county-level murder rates and individual-level birth outcomes for Black, Hispanic, and White mothers. Using the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting data from 1992 to 2002 and individual-level data from more than 30,000,000 US …

PLoS Medicine, 2021 (with Camilla Fabbri, Katherine Rodrigues, Baptiste Leurent, Elizabeth Allen, Mary Qiu, Martin Zuakulu, Dennis Nombo, Michael Kaemingk, Alexandra De Filippo, Elizabeth Shayo, Vivien Barongo, Giulia Greco, Wietse Tol, and Karen M. Devries)

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School-based violence prevention interventions offer enormous potential to reduce children’s experience of violence perpetrated by teachers, but few have been rigorously evaluated globally and, to the best of our knowledge, none in humanitarian settings. We tested whether the EmpaTeach intervention could reduce physical violence from teachers to students in Nyarugusu Refugee Camp, Tanzania. We conducted a 2-arm cluster-randomised controlled trial with parallel assignment. A complete sample of …

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021

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This study examines the role that racial residential segregation has played in shaping the spread of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the US as of September 30, 2020. The analysis focuses on the effects of racial residential segregation on mortality and infection rates for the overall population and on racial and ethnic mortality gaps. To account for potential confounding, I assemble a data set that includes 50 county-level factors that are potentially related to residential …

Demography, 2020

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This study investigates the effect of violent crime on school district–level achievement in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. The research design exploits variation in achievement and violent crime across 813 school districts in the United States and seven birth cohorts of children born between 1996 and 2002. The identification strategy leverages exogenous shocks to crime rates arising from the availability of federal funds to hire police officers in the local police departments where …

Eastern Economic Journal, 2020 (with Ingrid Ellen)

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Using restricted administrative data on the voucher program, we examine the experience of voucher holders in metropolitan areas with rising rents. While some of our models suggest that rising rents in metropolitan areas are associated with a slight increase in rent-to-income ratios among voucher holders, poor renters in general see significantly larger increases in rent-to-income ratios. We see little evidence that rising rents push voucher holders to worse neighborhoods, with voucher holders in …