Mehak Sachdeva receives First Year Assistant Professor Grant for urban polarization research

Mehak Sachdeva, Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and an affiliate of the Spatial Data Science Center (SDSC), has been awarded a 2025-2026 First Year Assistant Professor (FYAP) Grant for her project, "Placing Politics: A High-Resolution National Database for Analyzing Urban Polarization."

The project will construct a longitudinal, individual-level voter file dataset covering 2019-2022. This new data infrastructure will support research on political engagement and partisan segregation dynamics across the United States.

By building a high-resolution national database, the project strengthens SDSC's work in spatial social science and expands the center's capacity to study how political behavior varies across places, communities, and time.