Welcome to my website!
My name is Unchitta. Based in Washington DC, I am a Presidential Fellow and PhD candidate in computational social science at George Mason University.
I bring methods and perspectives of computational social science to study time use, human social activity, and mobility within cities. Using large-scale data and computation techniques, including ones I have developed, my PhD work explores topics such as social interaction and networks, scheduling, mobility flows, and spatial distributions of urban amenities. I focus particularly on the dimensions of socioeconomic inequality and segregation within cities.
I am also passionate about applying complex systems thinking and my computational experience to aid urban policymaking and planning. I’d like to help make cities more livable and equitable. I’ve started on this journey somewhat (see some projects in my resume) — I’d love to chat if you share the same mission and/or think I can be helpful!
News and Updates:
- 1/2025: I am excited to head to Trento, Italy and present our ongoing work to improve social information that can be learned from GPS mobility data co-locations at the 1st Conference on Computational Social Science Italy in Trento, IT.
- 4/2024: I will be presenting our work using mobile phone GPS data to study U.S. migration during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Population Association of America (PAA) 2024 conference this April in Columbus, Ohio, and then at the IC2S2 2024 conference in Philadelphia in July.
- 4/2023: I am excited to share my unpublished project on building an agent-based model of the spatial mismatch hypothesis (in which involuntary housing choices and relocation of jobs lead to poorer market outcomes for Black workers in U.S. urban areas) at the 2023 George Mason University Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference.
- 7/2022: I will be presenting our geo-demographic research on local family ties in US metropolitan areas at the IC2S2 2022 conference in Chicago this July!
- 03/2021: I am honored to have been invited to speak as a panelist at the Mathematical and Computational Approaches to Social Justice workshop hosted by ICERM at Brown University