Ben Rosche graduated with a Ph.D. from Cornell’s Department of Sociology in May 2024. In addition to his studies in Sociology, Ben also earned a minor in the Department of Computer Science with a focus on machine learning and natural language processing. While at Cornell, Ben was a member of Michael Macy’s Social Dynamics Laboratory, and worked for the OECD International Programme for Action on Climate (IPAC) as a data science consultant. Currently, he serves as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.
Dr. Rosche’s paper “Socioeconomic segregation in friendship networks: A network analysis of social closure in US high schools,” won the 2024 Best Paper Award from the Mathematical Sociology section and the section on Decision-making, Social Networks, and Society Section of the American Sociological Association.
Benjamin Rosche’s paper impressed the committee with both its methodological rigor and substantive contributions. Rosche advances recent high-profile work on socioeconomic segregation in friendship networks, deepening our understanding of the complex mechanisms that produce such enduring segregation patterns. He shows that behind the so-called “SES bias” in friendship choices is a set of interrelated factors including racial homophily as well as structural constraints imposed by neighborhoods, courses, and extracurricular activities within high schools. His paper is also methodologically innovative. It breaks new ground for future work extending tie selection models (ERGMs) to multilevel level and the incorporation of survey weights. It is an impressive application of a rigorous mathematical sociological approach to an enduring and important substantive puzzle.
(In addition to the above award, Ben’s paper also earned him the 2023 Robin M. Williams Jr. Best Paper Award from the Department of Sociology at Cornell University.)
