Professional Bio

Research Areas

Communities and Crime | Neighborhood Effects on Health | Spatial Stratification and Mobility

Graif’s published work focuses on the consequences of urban poverty and population diversity on crime and child health in connection to the spatial distribution of social capital. It highlights the relationship between neighborhood violence, immigration, and diversity in multi-ethnic and multi-racial urban United States’s contexts. In her current research projects, Graif integrates sociological and criminological perspectives to investigate neighborhood effects and inequalities in spatial exposures and mobility and how they shape opportunities and affect crime, distress, and risky and delinquent behavior among urban children and youth.

Graif teaches graduate and undergraduate level courses on communities and crime. She co-organized a Conference on Mass Incarceration and Health, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and served as a grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation. Graif chaired the 2013 American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting’s Sessions on "Communities and Violence" and on "Prisons, Jails, and Mental Health". She is member of the American Society of Criminology's Program Committee, serving as Sub-Area Chair for the sessions on "Neighborhood Effects", part of the 2016 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. She co-organizes the PRI's Changing American Neighborhoods and Communities (CANAC) Working Group starting in the Fall of 2015.

Graif received a five-year K01 Award from the National Institute of Health in 2017–2022 for a project on Big Data and Network Analysis of Children's Health. She also received the Roy Buck Award recognizing the best article in a refereed scholarly journal in the social sciences within the past year. She also received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the National Society of Leadership and Success, the Penn State University Chapter. In 2019, she received the Robert J. Bursik Junior Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology, Division on Communities and Place.

Research Interests

Graif studies communities and crime, with a focus on mobility and neighborhood effects on children and youth and on the spatial and network stratification of violence, health risk, and opportunity. Throughout her work, she integrates macro and micro level approaches to theory, applies experimental and counterfactual techniques to understand causal links, and combines spatial (GIS) and network analyses with computational big data analytics.

Research Projects

Graif's current projects focus on two major themes. First, she studies the mechanisms underlying neighborhood effects on children and youth’s exposures and involvement in risky behavior and violence, focusing among others on the role of immigration, legal status, non-cognitive skills, and institutional network infrastructure. Second, she studies how individuals, opportunities, and criminogenic risks move across geographic space and transportation network channels to impact neighborhood social capital and affect inequalities in exposures to poverty, health problems, and violence. Graif is also working on combining natural experiments (e.g., Hurricane Katrina and the Great Recession) with big data science to inform these topics. These projects include work with Census data and ACS, Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, LAFANS, the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Experiment, and Vital records. Her research has been supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Health.

Selected Publications

(Notes: Lead author(s) in bold font; *graduate student at the time)

Newmayer, Lauren*, Megan Evans*, and Corina Graif. 2021. "Socially Connected Neighborhoods and the Spread of Sexually Transmitted Infections." Accepted. Demography.

Graif, Corina,  John Meurer and Margherita Fontana. 2021." An Ecological Model to Frame the Delivery of Pediatric Preventive Care". Pediatrics. 148 (Supplement 1) s13-s20; DOI: 10.1542/peds.2021-050693D.

Wu, Ann Chen, Corina Graif, Shannon Gwin Mitchell, John Meurer, Kenneth D. Mandl. 2021. "Creative Approaches for Assessing Long-Term Outcomes in Children". Pediatrics. 148 (Supplement 1) s25-s32; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2021-050693F.

Graif, Corina, Brittany N. Freelin*, Yu-Hsuan Kuo*, Hongjian Wang*, Zhenhui Li, and Daniel Kifer. 2021. “Network spillovers and neighborhood crime: A computational statistics analysis of employment-based networks of neighborhoods.”  Justice Quarterly. 38:2, 344-374 DOI #: 10.1080/07418825.2019.1602160

Kelling, Claire E.*, Corina Graif, Gizem Korkmaz, and Murali Haran. 2020. "Modeling the Social and Spatial Proximity of Crime: Domestic and Sexual Violence Across Neighborhoods." Journal of Quantitative Criminology. DOI #: 10.1007/s10940-020-09454-w

Graif. Corina. 2019. “Democratizing urban development. Community organizations for housing across the United States and Brazil, by Maureen M. Donaghy" Invited Review. American Journal of Sociology 125(1): 280-282.

Wang, Hongjian*,  Huaxiu Yao*, Daniel Kifer, Corina Graif, and Zhenhui Li. 2019. Non-Stationary Model for Crime Rate Inference Using Modern Urban Data. IEEE Transactions on Big Data. 5(2):180-194.

Graif, Corina. 2018. "Neighborhood Diversity and the Rise of Artist Hotspots: Exploring the Creative Class Thesis through a Neighborhood Change Lens." City & Community 17(3): 754-787.

Graif, Corina, Alina Lungenu, and Alyssa Yetter*. 2017. “Neighborhood isolation in a Rust Belt city: Violent crime effects on increasing structural isolation and homophily in inter- neighborhood commuting networks” Social Networks. 51:40-59. 

- Winner of the Robert J. Bursik Junior Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology, Division on Communities and Place.

Graif, Corina and Stephen Matthews. 2017. “The Long Arm of Poverty: Extended Geography of Neighborhood Effects on Child Victimization” Justice Quarterly. 34(6):1096-1125.

Graif, Corina. 2016. "(Un)natural Disaster: Vulnerability, Long-Distance Displacement, and the Extended Geography of Neighborhood Distress and Attainment after Katrina" Population and Environment. 37(3): 288-318.

-Highlighted in the PSU PRI news, *in a Bloomberg news article by Mark Whitehouse, *and in a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell

Arcaya, Mariana, Corina Graif, Mary Waters, and S.V. Subramanian. 2016. “Health Selection into Neighborhoods among Moving to Opportunity Families.” American Journal of Epidemiology. 183(2):130-7.

-Highlighted in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) News

Wang, Hongjian*,  Daniel Kifer, Corina Graif, and Zhenhui Li. 2016. “Crime Rate Inference with Big Data.” 2016. Proceedings of the Knowledge Data Discovery ACM SIGKDD.

Graif, Corina, Mariana Arcaya, and Ana Diez Roux. 2016. “Moving to Opportunity and Health: Exploring the Spatial Context of Neighborhood Health Effects” Social Science and  Medicine 162:50-58.

Alyssa Yetter*, Corina Graif , and Sarah Fry*. 2016. “Public Housing”. Invited chapter in The American Middle Class: An Economic Encyclopedia of Progress and Poverty, edited by Robert Rycroft. Greenwood: Santa Barbara, CA.

Graif, Corina. 2015 " Delinquency and Gender Moderation in the Moving to Opportunity Intervention: The Role of Extended Neighborhoods."  Criminology. 53(3): 366–398.

- Highlighted in the Atlantic’s City Lab and in the Marshall Project

- Received the Roy Buck Award for the best article published by a refereed scholarly journal in the social sciences within the last year, College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State

Graif, Corina, Andrew S. Gladfelter*, and Stephen A. Matthews. 2014. "Urban Poverty and Neighborhood Effects on Crime: Incorporating Spatial and Network Perspectives". Sociology Compass 8: 1140–1155.

-Highlighted in a Next City article by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

Tran, Van C., Corina Graif, Alison D. Jones, Mario L. Small, and Christopher Winship. 2013. "Participation in Context: Neighborhood Diversity and Organizational Involvement in Boston." City and Community. 12(3): 187-210.

Graif, Corina. 2012. "Getting Ahead: Social Mobility, Public Housing, and Immigrant Networks (By Silvia Dominguez)" Invited Review. American Journal of Sociology. 117(4): 1253-1255.

Graif, Corina, and Robert J. Sampson. 2009. "Spatial Heterogeneity in the Effects of Immigration and Diversity on Neighborhood Homicide Rates." Homicide Studies. 13(3): 242-260.

-Featured in Contexts Discoveries: New and Noteworthy Social Research in  May 19, 2010, article “Safety in the Melting Pot” by Sarah Shannon.

Sampson, Robert J. and Corina Graif. 2009. "Neighborhood Social Capital as Differential Social Organization: Resident and Leadership Dimensions." American Behavioral Scientist. 52(11):1579-1605

-Reprinted in: Social, Ecological and Environmental Theories of Crime. 2011. Edited by Jeffery T. Walker. Ashgate.

-Reviewed by Chris Walker in the Journal of the Institute for Comprehensive Community Development, December 2010.

Sampson, Robert J. and Corina Graif. 2009."Neighborhood Networks and Processes of  Trust." Pp. 182-216 in Whom Can We Trust? How Groups, Networks, and Institutions Make Trust Possible edited by Karen Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi. New York: Russell Sage Foundation (peer reviewed).

Lucas, Jeffrey W., Corina Graif, and Michael J. Lovaglia. 2007. "Prosecutorial Misconduct in Serious Cases: Theory and Design of a Laboratory Experiment." Pp. 119-136 in Experiments in Criminology and Law. A Research Revolution, edited by Christine Horne and Michael J. Lovaglia. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Lucas, Jeffrey W., Corina Graif,and Michael J. Lovaglia. 2006. "Misconduct in the Prosecution of Severe Crimes: Theory and Experimental Test." Social Psychology Quarterly, 69(1):97-107.

-Reprinted in The Process of Social Research by Jeffrey C. Dixon, Royce Singleton, and Bruce Straits.  Oxford University Press

Tausig, Mark, Rudy Fenwick, Steven L. Sauter, Lawrence Murphy, and Corina Graif. 2004. "The Changing Nature of Job Stress: Risk and Resources." Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being 4:93-126.

Professional Awards, Grants, and Fellowships:

National Institute of Health, NICHD, Population Dynamics Branch - Career Development K01 Award. Big Data and Network Analysis of Children's Health (2017-2023).

Robert J. Bursik Junior Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology, Division on Communities and Place (2019).

Roy Buck Award for the best article in the social sciences within the last year, Penn State's College of the Liberal Arts (2016)

National Science Foundation. Research Experience for Undergraduates, Co-PI (2016-2018)

National Science Foundation. Research Grant, Co-PI (2015-2018)

Faculty Fellow, Social Science Research Institute, Penn State University (2016-2017)

Excellence in Teaching Award, the National Society of Leadership and Success, the Pennsylvania State University Chapter (2016)

Population Research Institute, Penn State, Research Grant (2015)

Social Science Research Institute, Penn State, Research Grant (2014).

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program, Research Seed Grant (2012-2013)

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor  (2011-2013)

American Sociological Association's Children and Youth Section Graduate Student Paper Award. Runner-up. (2012)

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant (2010-2011)

Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Urban Dissertation Fellowship (2010-2011)

American Sociological Association's Student Paper Award (honorable mention) from the Community and Urban Sociology Section (2010) for "Creative Class and Diversity: Spatial and Temporal Dynamics across Chicago Neighborhoods"

Center for American Political Studies Fellowship, Harvard University (2009-2010)

Project for Justice, Welfare, and Economics, Research Fellowship at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (2008-2009).

Harvard Real Estate Academic Initiative Research Grant (2008).

Urban Policy and Governance Summer Award at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government, J. F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2008)

Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Research Grant for "The Role of Nonprofits in the Lives of  Urban Dwellers: A Qualitative Exploration" (Co-PI with Van Tran),  J. F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2008).

Howard T. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Geographic Information Science (GIS) from Harvard University (2007) for her Master's Degree Thesis on "Creative Class and Diversity: Spatial and Temporal Dynamics across Chicago Neighborhoods".

Certificate in GIS and Population Science and Travel Award, from the Population Research Institute and Center for Spatially Integrated Social Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara, CA (2005).