Gerard Torrats-Espinosa

Gerard Torrats-Espinosa is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, contributing to the Social Science faculty, and a member of the Data Science Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University in 2019, a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2014, and a B.S. in Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 2004. Before entering academia, he served as a firefighter with the Barcelona Fire Department from 2007 to 2011. Torrats-Espinosa joined Columbia in 2020 as an Assistant Professor following a postdoctoral position as a researcher at the university’s Data Science Institute and in the Department of Sociology beginning in 2019.

His research integrates urban sociology, stratification, and criminology to examine how the spatial organization of the American stratification system perpetuates inequality. Employing causal inference and machine learning techniques, he investigates the impact of neighborhood contexts—especially community violence—on children’s life chances, the development of social capital in spatial settings, and the role of place in shaping educational and economic opportunities. His scholarship has appeared in leading journals such as the American Sociological Review, Demography, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Urban Economics, Housing Policy Debate, Child Development, and Social Science & Medicine. Notable publications include “The Fall of Violence and the Reconfiguration of Urban Neighborhoods” (Demography, 2025, with Patrick Sharkey), “From the Block to the Beat: How Violence in Officers’ Neighborhoods Influences Racially Biased Policing” (American Journal of Sociology, 2025, with Samuel Donahue), “Using Machine Learning to Estimate the Effect of Racial Segregation on COVID-19 Mortality in the United States” (PNAS, 2021), and “The Crime Drop, Informal Social Control and Organized Crime: The Non-profit Model” (American Sociological Review, 2017, with Patrick Sharkey and Delaram Takyar).

Torrats-Espinosa has been awarded the Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar position for 2024-2025, focusing on racial disparities in policing using large-scale administrative data; a Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Grant in 2022 for research on diversity and peer influences in policing; and a 2024 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in collaboration with Kara Rudolph, to study community-level exposure to aggressive policing and adverse childhood experiences.

Professional Email: gerard.torrats@columbia.edu