About Eviction Lab

Ndidi is a sophomore at Princeton University intending to concentrate in the Woodrow Wilson School and pursue certificates in Global Health and Health Policy, Statistics and Machine Learning, and African American Studies. On campus, she serves as Vice President of the Outreach Committee of Insure Jersey, an organization which connects to local community centers in order to aid community members in the health insurance enrollment process, and volunteers with the HomeFront Health Initiative and Health In Princeton Schools. As someone who is interested in the social determinants of health, she looks forward to further investigating the relationship between eviction rates and health outcomes.

Sean is a third year computer science student at Princeton University. On campus, he is a member of the varsity men’s Water Polo team and a swim instructor for Princeton University Aquatics.

In his free time, he enjoys listening to/discovering new music and spending time outdoors. As a student researcher, he hopes to assist in further uncovering inequalities to the accessibility of affordable, quality rental housing.

Henry is a first-year doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. He graduated from Harvard College in 2017 with a degree in Sociology and a minor in Statistics. For his undergraduate thesis, he studied how American cities have become unaffordable for many renters and the consequences that has had for social life in rent-burdened communities. Henry currently studies the causes of rising rent prices, the relationships between landlords and tenants, and how evictions affect community life. In his free time, Henry likes to cook, listen to podcasts, and recite scenes from sitcoms to patient friends.

Maia Hamin is a junior pursuing a degree in Computer Science at Princeton with certificates in Cognitive Science and Technology and Society. She developed her interest in natural language processing as a research mentor at the Princeton AI4ALL program, where she designed and led a project to create a solution to the Fake News Challenge with high-achieving high schoolers from underrepresented backgrounds. On campus, she is the Editor-in-Chief of the Princeton Tiger (campus’ oldest, best, and only humor magazine) and a co-organizer of a departmental reading group on Sociology and Ethics in Computer Science. In the lab, she is excited to experiment with programmatic approaches to tasks in natural language processing and to use data to explore the relationship between eviction, poverty, and the law.

Gracie is a doctoral candidate in Demography and Social Policy at Princeton University, and a medical student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She graduated with an AB from Princeton in 2012 in Public Policy and International Affairs. Gracie studies health disparities, and how social inequality is reflected in, and perpetuated by, the health care system. Her recent work has looked at how the effects of abstinence-only education funding on teen reproductive health outcomes varies by state political ideology, and how ACA-facilitated Medicaid expansion altered social determinants of health such as food insecurity. In her free time Gracie likes to ski, take pictures of everything she cooks, and ask strangers if she can pet their dogs.

Hyojin Lee is an undergraduate at Princeton University. She is currently pursuing a degree in chemistry and a certificate from the Classics Department. On campus, she engages in peer advising and service; as a volunteer for the Pace Center for Civic Engagement, she is particularly enthusiastic about traveling with other students to Trenton to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. In her spare time, Hyojin is currently trying to make the jump from medium- to long-distance running. She also enjoys learning the languages that come her way.

Matt is a doctoral student in Population Studies and Social Policy at Princeton University. He graduated with his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2015. Before beginning his studies at Princeton, Matt worked as a research assistant and programmer at Mathematica Policy Research, where he developed an interest in housing policy and segregation. Matt currently studies how racial, ethnic, and economic integration can reduce prejudice and improve social trust within communities. At the Eviction Lab, he hopes to study how integration and fair housing policies affect residential displacement patterns. Matt plays guitar, drums, and a bit of piano and in a past life, was a drummer in an alternative rock band.

Devin Q. Rutan is a first-year Ph.D. student in Princeton’s Sociology Department and is affiliated with the Office of Population Research. He is interested in the re-production of spatial inequality and the persistence of residential segregation. In 2016, he received a Bachelor of Philosophy in Urban Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently exploring the relationships between rising rents and evictions.

Gillian Slee is a first-year doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. She graduated from Harvard College in 2016 with a degree in Social Studies and a minor in Psychology. In 2017, Gillian earned her M.Phil. degree in Criminology at the University of Cambridge where she was a Herchel Smith Harvard Scholar. For her undergraduate thesis, she conducted an ethnographic study of public defenders and their clients in New York City’s criminal courts. Her master’s thesis explored legitimacy and legitimation in the British context and investigated how power-holders justified their authority in magistrates’ court. Gillian’s current research focuses on urban poverty, criminal justice, policy, and ethnography. At the Eviction Lab, Gillian is exploring the consequences of eviction on various neighborhood-level outcomes, including voting.

Michael Zhang is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science. He earned a PhD in statistics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018.

His research interests include probabilistic machine learning, scalable computation, Bayesian non-parametrics and its applications to the social sciences.

James Minton is a designer and web developer committed to projects with a focus on public service and social justice. He holds degrees in photography, multimedia arts and psychology. Most recent projects include work with NYU School of Medicine, and developing Justshelter.org in conjunction with Matthew Desmond’s release of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. As Creative Director of the Eviction Lab Web Team, he oversees visual design for user interfaces and other website pages, as well as contributes to front end coding. He also serves as general manager and principal liaison to the Research Team.

Abby Bajuniemi is a former visiting professor of Linguistics and Spanish at Macalester College. She completed a PhD in Hispanic and Lusophone Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, where her research interests centered on language acquisition and sociolinguistics. She translates that love of language structure and teaching into a passion for accessibility and inclusivity in design and content. As part of Eviction Lab’s web team and resident User Experience consultant, she conducts research that informs the design and function of the website and its content (English and Spanish). Outside of work, she writes and speaks on the intersection of UX and linguistics and mentors young professional women.

Noele is a visual designer and photographer with 10+ years’ experience designing for the web, specializing in branding, creative direction, UI design and product development. She studied photography and design at London College of Communication. Drawn to complex design problems that seek to improve quality of life, she has contributed to a number of projects and redesigns in tech and ecommerce, and recently nonprofit. Her interests outside design are typography, cities, maps, learning and exploration. As lead designer for Eviction Lab she is committed to building intuitive and accessible user experiences which will serve as instruments for learning and change.

Lane Olson holds a Bachelor of Science in computing science, with distinction, from the University of Alberta. With nearly two decades of web design and development experience, Lane has created interactive experiences for art galleries, universities, and highly acclaimed online courses. Through his previous work creating data visualizations and maps for online courses, like Mountains 101 and Indigenous Canada, Lane has developed a keen interest in creating interactive tools that are effective and easy to use. As the Technical Lead at Eviction Lab, Lane is working with the team to create the software architecture and implementation of the mapping and data tools for the project. When Lane’s not writing documentation or code, he’s helping out with a friend’s music project or working on one of his own.

Patrick received a Bachelor of Arts in public policy from the University of Michigan. This background has informed his work as a web developer, most recently creating tools for evaluations and interactive dashboards at a university research center. He has experience in data visualization and analysis as well as civic technology projects involving tenants’ rights and the justice system. As a developer for Eviction Lab’s web team, he works to integrate data and build functionality to make our mapping tool useful across a range of audiences and use cases.

Christopher Groskopf is a journalist and software engineer who lives in the piney woods of East Texas. For the Eviction Lab, Chris lent his expertise in information design and programming toward creation of our eviction mapping strategy, as well as recruitment of technical talent. Currently he’s building tools for solving problems with public data at Enigma. Before that, he spent eight years coding in the service of journalism, working on teams including NPR Visuals and Quartz Things. He is the creator of handy open source tools, such as csvkit, and the author of fun-to-cite documentation, like The Quartz Guide to Bad Data. Chris and his wife, Tasneem Raja, run a local news site called The Tyler Loop.

Jonny brings over 17 years of experience in the fields of web development, design, UI/UX, and project management to the team. Previously he worked with one of western Canada’s largest online education providers, where he was the UI/UX Team Lead, and a web developer Jack-of-all. As the CMS Specialist at Eviction Lab, Jonny is inspired to be working with modern content delivery services such as Netlify and Hugo, and the general world of “JAMstack” architecture. When he’s not slinging ones and zeros, Jonny will most likely be writing a song, or recording, as he is an award winning singer/songwriter in the Southern Gulf Islands of British Columbia, Canada.

Natalie studied economics and sociology at Mills College in Oakland, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Political, Legal and Economic Analysis. With over a decade working in a variety of industries, from real estate and sales to finance and non-profit, Natalie understands the importance of efficiency and effective management. As Eviction Lab’s operations and HR manager, she assisted in recruiting the web team as well as streamlined HR and accounting processes. She is passionate about community networks and small business optimization. When she’s not working with Eviction Lab, she’s planning her next event or collaborating with with artists and entrepreneurs in New York and California.