#  Elizabeth Bruch 

Visiting Scholar in Sociology

 

 

 



   ![Elizabeth Bruch](/sites/g/files/omnuum1481/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2026-09/Bruch_Elizabeth.jpg?itok=oXwtXdQV) 

 



 

 location\_on William James Hall 33 Kirkland Street Cambridge, MA 02138 

 



 

Elizabeth Bruch is Professor of Sociology and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research examines how social environments shape individual choices and how those choices, in turn, generate larger patterns of inequality and social organization. She combines computational modeling, large-scale behavioral data, and social science theory to study romantic partner selection, residential segregation, educational pathways, and other settings in which individual decisions are embedded in social structure. A central strand of her work develops new approaches in network science for representing theoretically meaningful features of social structure. Her current research also focuses on the design of interactive decision environments that allow people to discover opportunities, explore possible paths, and learn about the consequences of different choices in low-risk settings. She is the author of a forthcoming book from *Princeton University Press* on how local dating markets shape romantic opportunities and behavior.



 

 

 





 

 

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