Elizabeth Jacobs

Assistant Professor of Sociology

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BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT:

Dr. Elizabeth Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her research agenda asks how institutions – state, corporate, and academic – shape the economic, social and spatial mobility of immigrants and refugees. Using computational techniques and qualitative methods, she constructs and analyzes novel data sources to study the institutional reproduction of inequality in global contexts. Her scholarly interests encompass the areas of migration, gender, race, labor, and education, and the policies that produce differential outcomes in these domains. Her work has appeared in Social Forces, International Migration Review, Population and Development Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Higher Education, Frontiers in Sociology, Harvard Data Science Review and International Migration.

Before joining UConn, Liz was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. Before that, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and McCourt School of Public Policy. She has collaborated with the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees in Geneva, and has presented her work at the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED) in Paris, the Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung (BiB) (German Federal Institute for Population Research), and the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society.

 

EDUCATION:
Ph.D., Sociology, University of Pennsylvania (2021)
M.A., Sociology, Columbia University (2015)
B.A., Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania (2013)

 

SECONDARY ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS:

Oxford University, Nuffield College, Visiting Fellow (Oxford, UK)

Brown University Population Studies and Training Center, Research Affiliate (Providence, RI)

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Guest Researcher (Rostock, Germany)

University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center, Research Affiliate (Philadelphia, PA)

 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Jacobs, Elizabeth. 2025. “On the Up and Up: The Job Mobility of Skilled Return Migrants.” Social Forces. 103(4): 1538-1559. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae132

Jacobs, Elizabeth, Tom Theile, Daniela Perrotta, Xinyi Zhao, Athina Anastasiadou and Emilio Zagheni. 2025. “Global Gender Gaps in the International Migration of Professionals on LinkedIn.” Population and Development Review. 51(3). http://doi.org/10.1111/padr.70012

Jacobs, Elizabeth. 2024. “Greener Pastures: Why Indian International Students Leave the U.S. Labor Market.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 51(5): 1346-1370. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2397426

Donato, Katharine, Elizabeth Jacobs, Lisa Singh, Ali Arab and Nathan Wycoff. 2024. “Using Organic Data in Migration Research.” International Migration Review. 59 (1): 5-36. https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183231193627

Wycoff, Nathan, Ali Arab, Katharine Donato, Lisa Singh, Elizabeth Jacobs, Kornarphop Kawintiranon, and Yaguang Liu. 2023. “Forecasting Ukrainian Refugee Flows With Organic Data Sources.” International Migration Review. 59 (1): 37-60. https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183231203931

Jacobs, Elizabeth. 2022. “Work Visas and Return Migration: How Migration Policy Shapes Global Talent.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 48(7): 1647-1668. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1857232

Jacobs, Elizabeth. 2022. “The Homogenizing and Diversifying Effects of Migration Policy in the Internationalization of Higher Education.” Higher Education. 83: 339-355. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00658-4

Jacobs, Elizabeth and A. Nicole Kreisberg. 2022. “The Gendered Occupational Value of a U.S. Education for Indian Immigrants.” International Migration. 60(6): 148-166. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12970

Donato, Katharine, Lisa Singh, Ali Arab, Elizabeth Jacobs and Douglas Post. 2022. “Migration, Misinformation and the Venezuelan Refugee Crisis.” Harvard Data Science Review. 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.a4d9a7c7

Donato, Katharine, Lisa Singh, Ali Arab, Elizabeth Jacobs and Douglas Post. 2021. “Migration Misinformation in Spanish-language Tweets During a Pandemic.” International Organization for Migration Research Series. https://publications.iom.int/books/mrs-no-68-migration-misinformation-spanish-language-tweets-during-pandemic

Jacobs, Elizabeth. 2019. “Pathways to Permanence: Legal Status Transitions as a Key Mechanism in Skilled Migrant Selection and Settlement,” in “Immigration in the Global Era: Migrants and the People and Laws at Origin and Destination,” ed. Guillermina Jasso and Moshe Semyonov. Frontiers in Sociology. 4(44). https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2019.00044