Brian Louis Levy

Brian Louis Levy

Brian Louis Levy

Assistant Professor

Sociology: Inequality, Poverty, Mobility; Neighborhoods; Community and Urban Sociology; Race, Class, and Gender; Education; Social Demography; Quantitative Research Methods; Causal Inference

Brian L. Levy is Assistant Professor of Sociology at George Mason University. Brian studies inequality in the United States with a focus on neighborhoods, segregation, poverty, and social policy. One current project takes a life course perspective to study neighborhood effects on individuals’ social and economic outcomes. A second project uses big data to study structural connections between neighborhoods forged by residents’ everyday mobility patterns and their impact on neighborhood vitality.

Brian received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master’s in Public Affairs from the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining Mason, Brian was a postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology Department at Harvard University. He also previously served as a Presidential Management Fellow and Social Science Analyst (2009-2012) in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Brian’s work appears in venues such as American Sociological Review, Demography, Science Advances, Social ForcesSociological Methods and Research, and Sociology of Education.

Selected Publications

Levy, B., K. Vachuska, S.V. Subramanian, and R.J. Sampson. 2022. "Neighborhood socioeconomic inequality based on everyday mobility predicts COVID-19 infection in San Francisco, Seattle, and Wisconsin." Science Advances 8(7). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abl3825.

Levy, B. 2022. "Wealth, Race, and Place: How Neighborhood (Dis)advantage from Emerging to Middle Adulthood Affects Wealth Inequality and the Racial Wealth Gap." Demography 59(1): 293-320. doi: 10.1215/00703370-9710284.

Phillips, N., B. Levy, R. Sampson, M.L. Small, and R. Wang. 2021. “The Social Integration of American Cities: Network Measures of Connectedness Based on Everyday Mobility Across Neighborhoods.” Sociological Methods and Research 50(3): 1110-49. doi: 10.1177/0049124119852386.

Levy, B. N. Phillips, and R. Sampson. 2020. “Triple Disadvantage: Neighborhood Networks of Everyday Urban Mobility and Violence in U.S. Cities.” American Sociological Review 85(6): 925-956. doi: 10.1177/0003122420972323.

Levy, B. 2019. “Heterogeneous Impacts of Concentrated Poverty During Adolescence on College Outcomes.” Social Forces 98(1): 147-182. doi: 10.1093/sf/soy116.

Levy, B., A. Owens, and R. Sampson. 2019. “The Varying Effects of Neighborhood Disadvantage on College Graduation: Moderating and Mediating Mechanisms.” Sociology of Education 92(3): 269-292. doi: 10.1177/0038040719850146.

 

Courses Taught

SOCI 313: Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences

SOCI 355: Social Inequality

SOCI 395: Poverty & U.S. Social Policy

SOCI 730: Analytic Techniques of Social Research