Tim Thomas is a professional researcher and research director at Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project (UDP) specializing in urban sociology, demography, and data science. His research focuses on how neighborhood change, housing disparities, policies, and displacement affects household socioeconomic stratification and mobility by race and gender in the United States. His research at the UDP centers on developing open-source tools to measure displacement and gentrification as well as a national housing precarity risk model measured through the risk of eviction, displacement, and unemployment. Tim is also the director for the Eviction Research Network, a multi-institution collaboration that analyzes household and neighborhood drivers of eviction using census data, text mining court records, and linking eviction data to administrative records. Tim's research agenda is marked by an intellectual foundation in policy-relevant research operationalized through civic and academic collaborations that address real-world problems and advances scholarly research. His team's work on eviction and housing precarity has provided empirical evidence to help pass tenant protections laws in several states across the country, informed the CDC eviction moratorium extension during the pandemic, and advised the White House and HUD on eviction trends in the United States.
Job title:
Research Training Lead, Berkeley Computational Social Science Training Program
Department:
Urban Displacement Project, UC Berkeley
Bio/CV:
Role:
Topics
