Dylan Connor (PhD, UCLA 2017) is an Associate Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University, core faculty at the Spatial Analysis Research Center (SPARC), and Director of the Life Chances Lab. In 2024-2025, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

As a computational social scientist and geographer, Dr. Connor’s research focuses on the geography of life chances—investigating how neighborhoods and regional economies dictate our ability to build wealth, achieve upward mobility, and live long, healthy lives. Rather than taking a static perspective on opportunity, his work explores how communities adapt to shifting economic and social currents over extended historical periods.

To map these long-term spatial dynamics, Dr. Connor and his lab engineer large-scale synthetic population and GeoAI architectures to study the evolving capacities of places to improve life chances. Beyond building foundational data infrastructures like GEOWEALTH (co-led /w Tom Kemeny, University of Toronto), he has published extensively on the changing geography of the American Dream, rural and left-behind places, and the economic history of immigration.

His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Connor's work informs public policy and discourse, having been cited in the European Commission/OECD report on Inclusive Cities and featured in major outlets such as Brookings, Bloomberg, Business Insider, and Marginal Revolution. He has appeared on the Human Centered podcast in conversation with Nobel Laureate David Card.

► For a complete record of publications and projects, please view his CV.