Eric Martin Feltham

Postdoctoral Research Scholar, Sociology

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I am a Data Science Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. I received my PhD in Sociology from Yale University in May 2023.

My research asks how people understand and navigate social structure. I examine how individuals mentally represent the communities around them—leaning on cultural categories when evidence is thin—and how these representations shape and constrain their access to information and resources. A second line turns to what happens when status categories like education and race lose their power to sort people, and how the resulting struggle over group boundaries fuels conflict, prejudice, and political division. I study these questions with field and behavioral experiments, novel survey methods, formal models, and causal inference on observational and historical data. I also develop open-source statistical software.

Additionally, I hold an MA in Statistics from Yale, and undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.