Elizabeth Ackert

Biography

Liz Ackert is an Assistant Professor of Geography. She is a Research Associate at the Broom Center for Demography. She received her BA in Biology from Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, MN), and holds an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and an MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington (Seattle). Dr. Ackert was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and an NSF SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She has been at UCSB since 2019.

Research

Professor Ackert's research interests include racial/ethnic inequality, immigration, education, health disparities, urban geography, and quantitative methods. Her work examines explanations for why racial/ethnic and immigrant-origin groups are unequally distributed across contexts– including schools, neighborhoods, and immigrant destinations– and evaluates the consequences of this contextual inequality for disparities in outcomes in domains such as education, residential mobility, and health. Dr. Ackert is particularly interested in understanding how the attributes of immigrant-receiving contexts, including states, communities, neighborhoods, and schools, influence the educational and health outcomes of children and adolescents of Mexican origin.