Tyler W. McDaniel

I am a sociologist who uses quantitative and computational methods to answer questions relating to the environment, schools, and spatial inequalities. My research leverages geographic data, causal inference, and visualization techniques to study the production of spatial inequality in the twenty-first century. As a teacher, I draw connections between the environment, data, and society. 

My dissertation asks a fundamental question for the climate-changed era: how do environmental hazards reshape spatial inequalities among K-12 students? While the changing climate is expected to alter social processes such as migration and stratification, little is known about how these changes will affect education. Using the case of North Carolina, I first note weak descriptive linkages between school and residential flood risks, a fact that shapes students’ flooding experiences and potential policy responses. For schools that are impacted by disasters, I assess impacts on school enrollments, revealing large short-term declines for schools in the most-affected neighborhoods, but longer-term enrollment growth for schools in moderately-affected neighborhoods. I explore the extent to which repeated climate hazards lead to cumulative disadvantages in attendance and learning: prior flooding has little relationship with school closure days, which drive impacts for students. Finally, I leverage statewide student-level data to investigate how, and to what extent, hurricane flooding events influence ethnoracial segregation in schools and neighborhoods. Together, these papers demonstrate how climate hazards are currently shaping K–12 students’ schooling trajectories and inequalities.

In my teaching, I draw connections between social systems and the tools that we use to analyze societies. At Stanford, I designed and taught a course called “Analytics for a Changing Climate: Introduction to Social Data Science,” which introduced students to data science through the lens of the changing climate. In this class, we used sociological methods, such as network analysis and text mining, to study data on climate events and reports. I also have assisted in teaching courses in economic sociology, social psychology, and computational social science; and regularly teach classes on a wide range of topics with the Stanford Jail and Prison Education Project. This Spring, I will teach a course on computational social science.