Laila H. Noureldin is a Sociology Ph.D. student the University of Chicago. Her research interests lie in migration processes and their impact on social, political, and economic policies as well as identity construction, including both self-selective and assigned labels. Specifically, she examines the racialization of American Muslim immigrants including racial identity formation within generational processes and subsequent perceptions of discrimination based on these racial categories. Her current study examines the association between national ancestry and perceived levels of discrimination. Additionally, immigrant generation-levels are used to determine how this perceived discrimination is experienced across generations among individuals of the same national ancestry. This is part of her larger project on American Muslims, which examines how religiosity and immigrant generation-levels are related to American Muslim integration, using the nationally representative 2011 Pew Muslim American Survey.

Noureldin earned a Masters in Sociology from the University of Chicago where she examined the association between religiosity markers and primary self-identification among American Muslims using a series of binary logistic regression models.

She received a Masters of Education in Literacy Curriculum and Instruction from American University, where she foregrounded the importance of culturally race-related research through her thesis, advocating for the use of African American English (AAE) as an instructional tool for language and literacy acquisition among emergent African American readers. Her research was inspired by her time as a literacy teacher in a D.C., inner-city, elementary, public-charter school. She received a B.A. in Sociology and Arabic Language and Culture from Georgetown University. Her undergraduate senior thesis, which earned the 2011 Hoggson Award for Excellence in Sociology, is a historical-comparative piece that explains the sociological transformations and symbolic representation of the Islamic ‘veil’ in Egypt and Turkey during two distinct time periods, 1920 to 1939 and 1970 to 2011. Laila has grown up between the United States, primarily Los Angeles and Washington D.C., and the Middle East.