Welcome to my website!
My name is Unchitta. Based in Washington D.C., I am a Ph.D. candidate and researcher in computational social science at George Mason University.
I bring thoughts and methods of computational social science to extend existing sociological perspectives.
My Ph.D. work combines computation and datasets on human mobility and time use to explore how people coordinate their daily lives and how these patterns vary across social groups. I focus particularly on topics of daily social interaction, networks, scheduling, and sequence analysis, with an emphasis on racial inequality.
In a related area of research, I look at how we can better utilize large-scale mobile phone GPS trace data to advance sociological and demographic research.
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’d love to chat if you share the same mission and/or think I can be helpful!
News and Updates:
- 4/2025: I am grateful for this opportunity to present at both UMD Time Use Conference and PAA 2025 my current work on the link between social networks, schedules, and coordination, including implications for disparities in social connectedness. My talk will be in the “Social Isolation Across the Life Course” session.
- 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 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- 4/2023: I am excited to share my unpublished project on building an agent-based model of the spatial mismatch hypothesis (in which involuntary housing choices and relocation of jobs lead to poorer market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