Hi, I'm Hannah. I am a researcher focused on cities, policing, housing, and technology. I work to develop impact-oriented research, tell data-driven stories, and advocate for just policy and legislative change. 

My work investigates the political economy of criminalization and urban geography. My dissertation shows the influence of corporate redevelopment on neighborhoods and arrests, tracing the connections between the real estate lobby and policing patterns. I also show how predictive algorithms, surveillance technology, and data vendors are impacting policing, prosecution, and incarceration decisions. I use statistical, spatial, and computational methods to analyze large-scale administrative and proprietary data. Additionally, I conduct qualitative interviews and archival analyses, particularly of legal and financial documents.  

I am a Ph.D. candidate and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. I have published on a number of topics, including the influence of real estate investment on low-level policing; the impact of carceral technology and the associated expertise challenges that algorithms pose in the courtroom; the relationships between economic crisis and protests against police violence; and the population level harms of solitary confinement for Black men. My work appears in City & Community, Science Advances, Social Studies of Science, Socius, and Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Work in progress examines the relationship between redevelopment, neighborhood change, spatial regulation, tenant harassment, and surveillance throughout New York City. 

I am also a senior data scientist on the central research team at Vera Institute of Justice working on data-driven policy and research projects across the criminal legal system. Some of my projects have included evaluating trends in jail and prison incarceration, including impacts from prison strikes on local jail populations; pilot testing AI tools for extracting information from police reports to identify low-level charges for quicker dismissal; collecting and analyzing calls for service in relation to local policy; developing dashboards to track impacts from sentencing reform rollbacks; and assessing the relationship between budgets, staffing, and crime during the post-Covid crime decline. 

I am also an affiliate researcher at the Incite Institute, where I am the project director on the Criminal Legal Algorithms, Technology, and Expertise project and a contributor to the Data and Racial Inequality Project. Previously I have worked with the Columbia Justice Lab and the Movements against Mass Incarceration Lab, as well as nonprofits and government offices including the ACLU of Massachusetts, Data for Black Lives, the Legal Aid Society, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I have also worked with local government offices, including the former assembly office of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on understanding and evaluating community safety, creating interactive data visualizations and conducting large-scale community interview projects.​ Previously, I worked as a senior data scientist in digital marketing, where I managed big data and machine learning projects in R, Python, and SQL. 

My full CV is available here. 

Please feel free to reach out at hpullenblasnik@gmail.com.