Prof. Joscha Legewie, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Sociology at Harvard University

Joscha Legewie (Ph.D. 2013, Columbia University) is a post-doctoral research fellow in the research unit "Inequality and Social Policy" and an affiliate of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC). He will begin as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Education at New York University in 2014. His research explores important sociological questions related to education, social inequality, and ethnic relations based on innovative, quasi-experimental research designs and with a keen interest in "big data" as a promising source for future social science research. His dissertation examines the ways in which peers in school, and student culture affect the gender gap in educational outcomes using two quasi-experimental case studies and detailed data on students' friendship networks. Other research focuses on the effect of events on the relations between ethnic and racial groups. As part of this work, he uses a natural experiment to examine the influence of terrorist events on the perception of immigrants across nine European countries. More recently, he has looked at the effect of extreme violence against police officers on the use of police force against racial minorities in NYPD stop-and-frisk operations. Other work uses data from 7.7 million time and geo-coded 311 service requests to examine when and where New Yorkers complain about their neighbors making noise, blocking the driveway, or drinking in public to understand the conditions under which conflict emerges. His findings were published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review and other major journals.

For more information see his website.