Yale PhD Elizabeth Roberto recently won the Sussman Award for 2017 for her dissertation:

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Student Awards and Recognition
May 21, 2017

‘The Boundaries of Spatial Inequality: Three Essays on the Measurement and Analysis of Residential Segregation.’ The Sussman Award is given to the graduate student whose dissertation in the past two years is judged to be the most outstanding. Liz introduces a new index for measuring segregation and distance, called the Divergence Index, D. This divergence index is widely used in other natural science disciplines for measuring the difference between two statistical distributions. Liz borrows these concepts and applies them to city-level social science data in order to examine the difference between the racial distribution of a city and of a more specific, small locality. The measure has the potential to provide population-level information about living patterns that better reflect the realities of the space such as the presence of highways, major walkways and other natural or human-made barriers. She is currently on a  James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award in Studying Complex Systems at Princeton where she continues this line of research. Congratulations Liz!