Cody Arlie ReedResearch + data

Measurement · Models · Visualization

Applied research and data science.

I’m a computational sociologist and data scientist. I develop measures, models, and visualizations using surveys, text, geographic data, and millions of location records. Much of my research focuses on social inequality and urban dynamics.

Ph.D. in Sociology, Cornell UniversityPostdoctoral Associate, NYU Abu Dhabi

New York City block groups colored from purple for lower racial-composition gradients to yellow for higher gradients, ranked within the city
More gradual changeSharper change
050100

Percentile within New York City

Where racial composition changes sharply.New York City · 2020 Census. Yellow shows the sharpest spatial changes. Read about the analysis

Selected work

Questions, methods, and findings.

All five projects

Paper · 2026

Segregation across the day

How does racial segregation change across hours and days? I developed a method that combines mobile-phone locations, Census data, and high dimensional matrix multiplication to assess three theoretical perspectives on racial segregation dynamics.

  • Segregation estimation
  • Matrix computation
  • R and C++
Read the project

From location records to racial segregation

  1. Mobile-phone locations + Census dataAttach the racial composition of each phone’s inferred home tract.
  2. Weight nearby observationsMy matrix formulation combines demographic data with distances in space and time.
  3. Estimate segregation each hourCompare local racial composition with the commuting zone’s overall composition.
A continuous measure of racial segregation across space and time.

Population Association of America · 2024

Knowledge of parents’ work

Does knowing about a parent’s work help children enter the same occupational class? I developed a content-weighted semantic similarity measure to compare students’ and parents’ descriptions of the same parent’s job.

  • Word embeddings
  • Metric construction
  • Survey-weighted regression
Read the project

Synthetic example · a parent’s teaching job

Parent-survey description
“teaches mathematics; plans lessons; grades assignments.”
Student’s description of the same job
“explains arithmetic; prepares lessons; checks assignments.”
Both descriptions refer to teaching, although the wording differs. Word embeddings let me compare these accounts of the same job.

Skills and methods.

Background and interests.

I’m interested in how inequality persists and changes, and in developing ways to measure it. My research spans urban segregation, intergenerational mobility, and the relationship between climate change and migration. I also adapt ideas across fields—for example, taking inspiration from image edge detection to locate racial boundaries in cities.

At Cornell University, I was affiliated with the Center for the Study of Inequality. I also worked as a paramedic for five years and have taught emergency medical care and quantitative methods.

More about my background and publications