Loring Thomas

Biography and Research Interests

Loring Thomas is a quantitative social scientist, who studies how human societies adapt and respond to environmental pressure and climate change. He uses social networks and a structuralist perspective to investigate why people migrate and how migration patterns may change as a function of climate, transitions within communities, and the interplay between the existing drivers of migration and climate change. His research interests are currently categorized into several main areas:

• Social network methods
• Migration, networks, and climate change
• Environmental social movements

Loring received a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine where he helped to develop tools for small areal unit imputation and social network analysis. His work there also focused on understanding how heterogeneity in population distributions affected the spread of COVID-19. After his graduate work, Loring was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, where he focused on understanding how network structure facilitates international migration from central America, and how environmental pressure moderates this effect. He has worked extensively with a very interdisciplinary team of researchers, and integrates perspectives from both the social sciences and physical sciences in his work.