Announcements
: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field awarded ASA 2026 Public Understanding of Sociology Award
The ASA selection Committee chose to award the 2026 Public Understanding of Sociology Award to Dr. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field for her impressive work with the media, government, public education and community organizations in translating health equity research into meaningful social action. Dr. Wrigley-Field is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Minnesota Population Center. Her research addresses health inequities, and she has collaborated with governmental and community organizations to combat them.
In 2020-2021, Dr. Wrigley-Field met regularly with the Minnesota Department of Health Leaders to assist in developing measures of equity in COVID health metrics. When her work uncovered excess mortality among Minnesotan Native Americans, she collaborated with tribal leaders to disseminate this knowledge. She also worked with the Minneapolis Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs to prepare reports of the Minneapolis City Council on pandemic mortality in immigrant and refugee populations. She was twice invited to present her research to the director of the NICHD to help inform COVID-19 funding priorities.
Her research and public advocacy on COVID-19 vaccine equity was also particularly influential. In February 2021, she founded the Seward Vaccine Equity Project to distribute vaccines to African immigrants and their families, many of whom lived in communities with high hesitancy about childhood vaccines. The same month, she presented her research on vaccine allocation inequalities related to systemic racism to a group of 100 state health care leaders and workers in Minnesota, influencing crucial vaccination policies in early 2021. She has continued to train local government agencies and country employees on racial disparities in health and health impacts.
In 2022, Dr. Wrigley-Field helped found and lead a second community health organization, the East Phillips Health Team, which advocates for Little Earth, the nation’s only Indigenous-preference Section 8 housing, located in East Phillips, Minneapolis. This organization successfully advocated that the city of Minneapolis reconsider plans to house its entire fleet of diesel vehicles in this neighborhood that already faced excessive air pollution. As part of these efforts, Dr. Wrigley-Field lead-authored a letter of more than 300 health professionals to state legislators. This organization now focuses on distributing air filters, offering lead testing, and distributing information to residents about air pollution and ways to mitigate its risks.
In addition to her leadership in these organizations, Dr. Wrigley-Field regularly writes for the media and serves as an expert for the press. Her research related to racial inequalities during the pandemic, in which she noted non-pandemic U.S. Black mortality rates were higher than White mortality during COVID-19, was widely covered, and had a particularly large impact on the public understanding of racial inequalities. More locally, she ran a “politics of pandemics” book club at her local bookstore, which increased local public understanding of this topic.
Congratulations to Dr. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, recipient of the 2026 Public Understand of Sociology Award.
: Rent debt across Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge
- In 2025, average monthly rent debt among low-income households in Minnesota was $22.3 million. This is about ten times greater than the monthly budget for statewide rental assistance ($2.3 million).
- Under different scenarios regarding the proportion of immigrant households who missed rent payments in January and February 2026 as a consequence of Operation Metro Surge, the researchers estimate the total excess rent debt across Minnesota since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge is $27.4 - 51.3 million. This is on top of the $44.6 million rent debt typically expected during any two-month period in the state.
- These figures do not account for the months of March 2026 and beyond; the burden of excess rent debt on immigrant renters is expected to grow significantly over time.
Since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge on Dec. 4, 2025, thousands of Minnesotans have lost income. Many have been forced to miss work because it is not safe to commute or remain on-site due to ICE activity, while others have lost hours or seen working members of the household detained or deported. Immigrant households in Minnesota are already disproportionately exposed to unaffordable housing. Compared with similar non-immigrant households, immigrant households have lower incomes yet higher rents; 71% of immigrant households making less than $75,000 are rent burdened, spending greater than 30% of income on rent. This has created an escalating and emergent crisis situation for immigrant families across the state who are now facing the threat of eviction following missed rent payments in January and February 2026.
Prior to Operation Metro Surge, statewide rent debt – the total amount of unpaid rent that households collectively owe at a given time – was already very high. In a typical month, low-income households have rent debts of $22.3 million across Minnesota. This is around ten times higher than the monthly budget for statewide emergency rental assistance, which is roughly $2.3 million.
Economic and political shocks trigger additional, or excess, statewide rent debt. Under simple projections about increases in rent debt among low-income immigrant households since the onset of Operation Metro Surge in December 2025, we estimate that statewide rent debt as of February 2026 is $27.4 - 51.3 million in excess of average statewide rent debt of $44.6 million expected during any two-month period.
Read the full article at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs website.
: MPC Members named McKnight Land-Grant Professors
The McKnight Land-Grant Professorship Program is an award from the University of Minnesota designed to advance the careers of assistant professors at a crucial point in their professional lives. The designation of “McKnight Land-Grant Professor” is held by recipients for a two-year period. This year, three extraordinary MPC members received the designation, Juan Del Toro, Xiaoran Sun, and Di Zhu.
: Regrets, she's had a few
Gender and regret of computer science and engineering degrees
Social Science Research | MPC Members: Tom VanHeuvelen
- Women in computer science and, to a lesser extent, engineering fields report distinctly high levels of regret of their field of study compared to otherwise similar men
- Observed economic, occupation, industry, and sociodemographic characteristics don’t explain the high regret of women in these fields
- Efforts to open access to these critical computer science and engineering fields for women will likely fail unless deep cultural work is done to change the regret that many women feel after successfully entering these fields
: Enriching Census Data with Mobile Positioning Data
Journal: Science Matters | MPC Members: Di Zhu and David Van Riper
- The enriched census data incorporates human visitations extracted from large-scale mobile positioning data
- Identified and validated the potential home locations of 3.58 million anonymous mobile phone users across seven U.S. metropolitan areas
- Home detection results were used to enrich the socio-demographic profile of the places users visited
- The proposed data generation framework is adaptive, allowing future integration of diverse socio-demographic features at varying spatial and temporal scales
- This visitor-based census bridges the gap between conventional census and mobile phone data