Faculty Profiles

BIO

Elizabeth Bruch is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. She directed Michigan’s Computational Social Science Initiative from 2018-2021 and is currently the associate director of UM’s Institute for Data Science and AI. She studies how we stumble our way through major life decisions like where to live, who to date or marry, and what major to pursue in college; and how our goals, and strategies are enabled or constrained by social structures such as status hierarchies, dating or housing markets, and college curriculums. Her work is interdisciplinary; she collaborates with scholars in fields ranging from computer science and statistical physics to psychology and behavioral ecology with the goal of developing models that deepen our understanding of social processes. Her research has been published in venues such as Science, PNAS, and the American Journal of Sociology, and has won multiple awards including the Innovation Prize from the American Sociological Association section on Methodology. She is the co-PI of Revel, a non-profit, research-based dating app.