Advisor

Christy Lleras is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies atChristy L. Lleras the University of Illinois where she has been a faculty member since 2004. She completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at Pennsylvania State University and her undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  For over 20 years, Dr. Lleras has conducted empirical research on racial disparities in socioemotional and cognitive development, mental health, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes with an emphasis on neighborhood and school-level factors. She has extensive experience operationalizing the social environment and linking individual data with contextual data at school and neighborhood levels, including geographic data (e.g., zip code) from the Census. Dr. Lleras and her students have developed detailed measures of school segregation, school climate, school quality and neighborhood disadvantage.  They regularly employ sophisticated statistical approaches to appropriately model and analyze multilevel, longitudinal quantitative data such as hierarchical linear modeling.

Dr. Lleras regularly teaches several graduate courses including Advanced Research Methods, Advanced Quantitative Analysis, Social Theory, and Neighborhood Effects on Human Development. She also teaches an undergraduate course, HDFS 420: Inequality, Public Policy, and U.S. Families. She has been on the List of Excellent Teachers every year since joining the department in 2004.

Since 2013, Dr. Lleras has also served as an expert testifying witness and consultant for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, on several school desegregation cases.

Dr. Lleras office is in The Family Resiliency Center, 2026 Christopher Hall, 904 W. Nevada, Urbana, IL 61801.