Sanne Smith is the director of the master’s program in education data science and a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Her research interests center around the study of social networks and the creation of thriving, diverse contexts. She has studied, for example, why adolescents tend to segregate within schools, how interdisciplinary centers boost scholar productivity and how social capital within neighborhoods offsets ethnic health inequalities. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Networks, Research Policy and Social Science Research.

Her teaching includes courses that introduce students to coding, data wrangling and visualization, supervised and unsupervised machine learning (e.g., hierarchical linear modeling, structural equation modeling, factor and principal component analysis), and interpretation of quantitative data.

Prior to directing the GSE master’s program in education data science, she worked as a research scientist at the Center for Population Health Sciences at Stanford and carried out national survey collection for the Children for Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries in the Netherlands.