Sonia Torres Rodríguez is a research associate in the Office of Race and Equity Research at the Urban Institute, where she is affiliated with the Racial Equity Analytics Lab and the Community Engagement Resource Center. She applies advanced quantitative and participatory research methods to study policies and programs advancing equity and inclusion, particularly in housing, neighborhood change, and automated decisionmaking systems. Torres Rodríguez has experience with several data analysis programs, including R, Stata, Python, and NVivo, and has coauthored several Urban Institute publications related to disaggregating race and ethnicity data, translating racial equity and community engagement to policy audiences, and shifting power to residents through community engaged methods. Formerly, as a research analyst in Urban’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center, she was an assistant manager of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, a network advancing the effective and equitable use of data and technology.

Before joining Urban, Torres Rodríguez was a research fellow at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, supporting a national ethnographic study of poverty and inequality in primarily Spanish-speaking Latinx and Black communities in the US. Her work has been recognized through a 2021 Equity and Inclusion Student Fellowship from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, a 2022 Pipeline Program Award from the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, and a 2022 Research in Color Foundation Research Mentorship Fellowship. She holds a BA in mathematical economic analysis from Rice University and an MS in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University.