Faculty Expert Profile

Julia Burdick-Will’s research pairs educational and urban sociology to study the roots of educational inequality and the dynamics between communities and schools that shape learning opportunities. She has studied the effects of concentrated neighborhood poverty on cognitive development, the geography of elementary school openings and closings, and the impact of violence on student test scores and enrollment. Her current projects focus on metropolitan-level patterns of school mobility and segregation and the relationship between transportation, safety, and school attendance.

An article she authored about school violence won the 2014 James Coleman Award for the best article in the Sociology of Education from the American Sociological Association.

Her current projects continue to explore the ways that disadvantaged students move between a range of neighborhood and school contexts. The first of these projects brings together administrative data from both Baltimore City and the surrounding suburban Baltimore County to examine how students change schools within and between these districts. The second project uses real-time transportation, weather, and crime data to understand the relationship between public transit, safety, and school attendance in the context of full open-enrollment policies.