Associate Professor
About
Elizabeth Bruch is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Complex Systems, an Associate Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research, and an External Faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. She also leads the University of Michigan's Computational Social Science Initiative. Bruch earned her PhD in Sociology and Masters in Statistics from UCLA, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar from 2006-08. Her longstanding interest is in the quantitative study of human behavior, and what it implies for larger scale social patterns and dynamics. Her research combines substantive knowledge of human behavior from cognitive science, marketing, and decision theory with statistical techniques and richly textured online activity data in an effort to understand the dynamic interplay between human behavior and the social environment. She has developed "cognitively plausible" statistical models of neighborhood and mate choice and is applying models from behavioral ecology to understand how men and women adapt their mate-seeking strategies to particular romantic markets. She is also exploring how online dating markets are divided vertically into "leagues" and horizontally into "submarkets", as well as how people organize their search for romantic partners in space and time.
