Justin Sola
I research how people experience neighborhoods, the criminal justice system, gun ownership, and inequality. I use experiments, machine learning, longitudinal designs, interviews, and observations. I teach sociology, computational social science, criminology, and ethics in machine learning.
Assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill jointly appointed in Sociology and the School of Data Science and Society.
In 2024 I received a PhD from UC Irvine in Criminology, Law & Society with an emphasis in Race and Justice. I have been recognized with the 2023-24 Haynes Fellowship, the 2022-23 National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research Award, the 2022-23 UC Irvine Public Impact Fellowship, and the 2018-23 Social Ecology Arnie Binder Fellowship. I did fieldwork and manage data for the Shadow Costs project, which tests the impact of rehabilitation classes and monetary sanctions (funded by NSF, NIJ, RSF, and Haynes grants). My work has won awards from the American Society of Criminology, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Center for the Study of Guns in Society, and the Western Society of Criminology.
My active projects include:
- Reconsidering causal theories of neoliberalism,
- Evaluating the Shadow Costs of treatment programs,
- Creating spatial preference measures for surveys and survey experiments,
- Assessing how gun ownership and race affect neighborhood socialization, and
- Investigating how gun ownerships socialize around guns.
In my professional service I serve on the editorial board of Social Forces, have served for Sociological Perspectives, and review widely.