Jake K. Burchard

I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Sociology at Duke University and am affiliated with the Duke University Population Research Institute (DUPRI), Duke Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), Duke Network Analysis Center (DNAC), and the Multiscale Immune Systems Modeling (MISM) center. I received a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 2025 and a BA in mathematics from Cornell University in 2017. I am on the 2026-27 academic job market.

I am an economic, political, and medical sociologist broadly interested in the causes and consequences of inequality in post-industrial economies. I also have a strong interest in social theory and quantitative methodology, especially social network analysis.

My recent research can be broadly divided into two streams. The first explores how financialization has divided and rearranged traditional class coalitions over the past several decades in the US and UK, in particular by unevenly growing the incomes of different kinds of financial employees and by inflating home prices. It also explores questions related to the measurement of wealth stratification and inequality and to the changing nature of work under asset-manager capitalism. The second develops novel methods for social network analysis, including methods for measuring bridging, structural cohesion, and embeddedness in two-mode networks and methods for integrating within- and between-host dynamics in network models of disease diffusion. My work has been published in outlets such as Sociological Science, Social Problems, Socio-Economic Review, Social Networks, and The Journal of Mathematical Sociology.

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