Elizabeth Pelletier

Elizabeth Pelletier is a PhD candidate at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. Her research is motivated by understanding how policy shapes economic instability, inequality, and wellbeing for individuals and families. Her dissertation focuses on paid leave policies, and specifically how they affect employment and economic wellbeing among parents of newborns. Much of her work uses large administrative microdata, and some projects specifically explore how tools from data science and computational demography can be used to make these records more useful to social scientists. Pelletier is a trainee in the NIH-supported Data Science and Demography Training program through the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at UW.

Prior to starting at UW, Pelletier was a researcher at the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., where she used data on state criminal justice systems to inform policy debates about mass incarceration and system reform. Before that, she researched education funding in Canadian provinces as a Fulbright grantee at the University of Toronto. She holds a B.A. in Public Policy and Film Studies from the College of William & Mary and a M.S. in Public Policy and Management, with certificates in Demographic Methods and Social Statistics, from the University of Washington.