Sonia Torres Rodríguez is a research associate in the Race and Equity Division at the Urban Institute, where she is affiliated with the Racial Equity Analytics Lab and the Community Engagement Resource Center. She applies advanced econometric and data science research methods to study policies and programs that increase equitable access to housing, wealth, and neighborhoods of opportunity. She is a leader in developing new processes and trainings for collaborating with communities in participatory quantitative research and policy design. She also has multiple years of experience conducting Spanish-language mixed-methodology research and evaluation, particularly to increase research collaborations with Hispanic and Puerto Rican communities. Formerly, as a research analyst in Urban’s Housing and Communities Division, she supported research about neighborhood change and equitable urban development, and 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. She holds a BA in mathematical economic analysis from Rice University and an MS in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University.