Hannah Pullen-Blasnik

Researcher - Data Scientist - Sociologist

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Hi, I'm Hannah. I am a researcher focused on policing and incarceration, algorithms and surveillance, and urban space and place. I work to develop impact-oriented research, tell data-driven stories, and advocate for just policy and legislative change. 

My work investigates the influence of corporate developers and landlords on neighborhood policing patterns. I also show the role of algorithmic technology in facilitating criminalization, with a particular focus on the human decision-makers behind these tools. 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 currently a Ph.D. Candidate, Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow, and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. I am also the project director on the Criminal Legal Algorithms, Technology, and Expertise project at the Trust Collaboratory, where my recent publication examines how DNA analysis software destabilizes legal expertise in the courtroom and obfuscates human decision-making processes. I am also a researcher for the Data and Racial Inequality Project, the Movements against Mass Incarceration Lab, and the Columbia Justice Lab. My widely-cited 2021 publication found that 1 in 9 Black men in Pennsylvania are held in solitary confinement by the time they are 32, more than 8 times the risk that white men face.

Previously, I worked as a Senior Data Scientist in digital media marketing, managing big data and machine learning projects in R, Python, and SQL. I have volunteered as a data science consultant for the ACLU of Massachusetts, managed algorithmic surveillance research teams and oral history archives for Data for Black Lives, and collaborated on various projects with the Legal Aid Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I continue to work with nonprofits and local government offices on non-carceral solutions to community safety, creating interactive data visualizations and conducting large-scale community interview projects.​

My full CV is available here

Please feel free to reach out at hpullenblasnik@gmail.com or hannah.pullen-blasnik@columbia.edu.