Ruth Buck

My name is Ruth Buck and I am a second-year M.S. + Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography. My research interests concern how political and administrative redistricting, particularly at the municipal level, shape outcomes for marginalized groups. I am a graduate research assistant on the Longitudinal School Attendance Boundary Study (LSABS), a project co-led by Erica Frankenberg and Chris Fowler to collect and analyze longitudinal data on school attendance zone boundaries across the country. My Master’s research uses Boston Public Schools as a case study to examine how the scale at which different student assignment policies operate influences the interrelationship of school and residential sorting processes. Past work of mine focused on modeling the spatial properties of ranked choice voting (RCV) relative to districted electoral systems and the implications of RCV for achieving political representation for minoritized groups. 

Prior to Penn State, I received my BA in Geography from Macalester College with a minor in Data Science. I then spent two years as a researcher at the MGGG Redistricting Lab based at Tufts University studying computational approaches to US redistricting.