Adina Zeki Al Hazzouri: Social determinants of cognitive aging & inequalities: Challenges and Opportunities
2022-11-04 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York) | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On November 4, 2022, Adina Zeki Al Hazzouri (Epidemiology) will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Bio: Dr. Zeki Al Hazzouri is an epidemiologist and the overarching goal of her research program is to improve the understanding of how social and cardiovascular factors experienced across the life-course influence cognitive function, Alzheimer’s disease and Alzheimer’s related dementias (AD/ADRD). An important theme of her work focuses on poverty and financial well-being as social determinants of cognitive aging. Another theme of her work also focuses on causal inference methodologies that address challenges in ADRD research including, inverse probability weighting, trial emulation, and regression discontinuity designs. Her work leverages innovative methods such as pooling, cross-walking and harmonization of existing epidemiological cohorts to address life course ADRD research questions.

Sarah Burgard: Remembrance of things past? Measuring life course exposures as determinants of health
2023-04-21 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On April 21, 2022, Sarah Burgard will present “Remembrance of things past? Measuring life course exposures as determinants of health” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Bio: I am a professor of Sociology and by courtesy, of Epidemiology and Public Policy. I am also a Research Professor in the Population Studies Center and Research Affiliate in the Survey Research Center, both at the Institute for Social Research, and am the incoming director of the Population Studies Center. I have a publication record in social and health science journals in the areas of the life course determinants of health and wellbeing in later life and related health disparities, and have received funding for my research and for data collection in these areas from NIH and private foundations. I am currently an affiliate and Advisory Panel member for the Michigan Center for the Demography of Aging (MICDA), a Technical Review Committee member of the National Longitudinal Studies program of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a former member on the Population Association Board of Directors. I also led implementation of the Institute for Social Research Strategic plan for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for three years.
I conduct research on the social stratification of aging and health with population-based survey data, and have published extensively on the social factors underlying health disparities by socioeconomic status, gender, and race/ethnicity across the life course. I have focused particularly on the links between employment and health in later life, including mental health, chronic disease and overall health status, and health behaviors. Some of my recent research and funding has centered on understanding these questions in the context of economic recessions, which disrupt career, economic, and health paths for many adults, but especially for socioeconomically-marginalized groups. I am PI of the 2020 Americans’ Changing Lives Study ACLLIFE wave, which will collect full retrospective life histories including extensive information about life events from a cohort now in their late 50s, and a PI of the Michigan Recession and Recovery Study, a panel survey of adults in Southeast Michigan that has been tracking the life events and mental health of these individuals in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Using these data, I have published on the influences of job loss, financial shocks, debt, housing instability, and material hardship, with a focus on creating life course measures of cumulative disadvantage for which retrospective or prospective life history data are essential.

Molly Rosenberg: Cash transfers to promote healthy aging in low-income settings: Triangulating evidence from rural South Africa
2023-09-22 12:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Molly Rosenberg (Indiana) will present “Cash transfers to promote healthy aging in low-income settings: Triangulating evidence from rural South Africa” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Rosenberg is an epidemiologist and population health researcher who studies how social, structural, and economic factors influence health across the lifecourse. In her primary research line, Dr. Rosenberg examines how poverty alleviation interventions can influence health, and represents vulnerable populations in low-resource settings across the globe. Representative projects examine the impact of cash transfers on cognitive aging in rural South Africa (NIA R01AG069128, MPIs: Rosenberg and Kobayashi), the potential for microfinance to be used to promote natural disaster resilience in Haiti, and the association between an income generation program and healthcare utilization in Kenya. Trained as an infectious disease epidemiologist, Dr. Rosenberg also maintains research lines in the epidemiology of HIV and SARS-CoV-2.

Jason M Fletcher: Early Life Context and Old Age Mortality: Extending Barker
2023-09-29 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Jason M Fletcher will present “Early Life Context and Old Age Mortality: Extending Barker” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
A specialist in health economics, economics of education, social genomics, and child and adolescent health policy, Professor Fletcher focuses his research on examining social network effects on adolescent education and health outcomes, combining genetics and social science research, estimating long-term consequences of childhood mental illness, and examining how in utero and early life conditions affect later life health, cognition, and mortality. He is an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, Institute for Research on Poverty, and Center for Demography on Health and Aging at the University and a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Group at the University of Chicago.
He earned a B.S. in economics and public administration from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville (Summa Cum Laude) and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Applied Economics. From 2010-2012, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University. In 2012 he was selected for a career development award by the William T. Grant Foundation. That award is funding a study of the interplay between genetics and social settings in youth development.
Professor Fletcher’s recent articles have appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Health Economics, and Demography. His book (with Dalton Conley)—The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals About Ourselves, Our History and Our Future—was published by Princeton University Press.

Jeremy Moulton: Demographics and Housing: Lessons from Big Data
2023-10-13 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Faculty Fellow Jeremy Moulton will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Moulton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy at UNC. He earned his PhD in Economics from the University of California-Davis in 2011. Dr. Moulton is an applied microeconomist with research interests in aging, intergenerational transfers, housing, labor, self-employment, and health. Much of his work has used ‘natural experiments’ such as changes in program eligibility rules or policies to identify causal effects of demographic, health and labor outcomes. For instance, he has investigated the Earned Income Tax Credit, Social Security, Medicare Part-D, property tax exemptions, and the World War II G.I. Bill, using several different empirical methods: difference in differences, fixed effects, and regression discontinuity. Much of his research is focused on better understanding public policy’s impact on older populations and how these policies affect their family and household members.

Kris Marsh
2023-11-03 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Kris Marsh will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Kris Marsh received her PhD from the University of Southern California in 2005. She was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina before joining the faculty of Maryland where she has been tenured since 2014.
Dr. Marsh’s general areas of expertise are the Black middle class, demography, racial residential segregation, and education. She has combined these interests to develop a research agenda that is divided into two broad areas: avenues into the Black middle class and consequences of being in the Black middle class.
Currently, Dr. Marsh is writing a book for Cambridge University Press that examines the mental and physical health, wealth, residential choices and dating practices of an emerging Black middle class that is single and living alone. Dr. Marsh is also in the beginning stages of a book exploring the perceptions and motivations of Black middle-class golfers.
Professor Marsh also teaches courses on Research Methods, Race Relations and Racial Residential Segregation. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the University of Johannesburg.
Dr. Marsh has served as a contributor to CNN in America, the Associated Press, NBC Washington, and Al Jazeera America and is frequently asked to contribute to the Washington Post. She served as the Secretary of the District of Columbia Sociological Society and the Managing Editor of Issues in Race & Society. Dr. Marsh was awarded the Jacquelyn Johnson Jackson Early Career Award from the Association of Black Sociologists in 2015 and received the Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar award for 2017. Dr. Marsh was elected Chair of the Section on Race, Gender and Class of the American Sociological Association in 2019.
Professor Marsh’s most recent research and intellectual endeavors center on improving police- community relations. Since late 2015, Dr. Marsh has been the driving force behind a bias free training and research collaboration between Prince George’s County Police Department and the University of Maryland. Dr. Marsh was appointed to the Prince George’s County Police Reform Task Force in 2020 and is the Chair of the subcommittee on recruiting, hiring, training, promotions & evaluations, human resource and mental health. Dr. Marsh also serves on the President’s University of Maryland Task Force on Community Policing.

Kristen A Lindquist, The Physiological Hypothesis of Emotional Aging
2023-11-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Kristen Lindquist will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Kristen Lindquist, PhD. is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research seeks to understand the psychological and neural basis of emotions, moods, and feelings. Her on-going work uses tools from social cognition, physiology, neuroscience, and big data methods to examine how emotions emerge from the confluence of the body, brain, and culture.

Yan Zhang: Number of Children and Older Adults' Cognitive Function in the U.S., UK, and China
2024-01-19 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Yan Zhang will present “Number of Children and Older Adults’ Cognitive Function in the U.S., UK, and China” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
“I am an assistant professor at East Carolina University, Department of Sociology. I was a postdoc research scientist at Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, before joining ECU. My research agenda focuses on family demography, population health, aging & life course, and gender & sexuality. I am particularly interested in examining how family relationships influence health outcomes among aging population. My current research investigates the association between parenthood (i.e., parental status, parent-child relationship, and fertility history) and older adults’ risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
Some of my work has been published in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, The Gerontologist, Social Science & Medicine, SSM-Population Health, Annals of Epidemiology, Chinese Sociological Review, among other outlets (; ; )
I earned a B.A. in sociology at China Agricultural University, a M.A. in sociology at University at Buffalo, and a Ph.D. at Michigan State University.”

Ganga Bey:Characterizing Pathways from Social Stressors to Cognitive Health Disparities: Theory and Emerging Evidence
2024-02-16 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Ganga Bey will present “Characterizing Pathways from Social Stressors to Cognitive Health Disparities: Theory and Emerging Evidence” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Ganga Bey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology within the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She studies how people’s beliefs about identity, worth, and ability affect their stress, aging, and susceptibility to disease.

Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez: Associations between accelerating aging and life expectancy
2024-03-22 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Hiram Beltrán-Sánchez will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez’s research focuses on the demography of health and aging. He has written on health patterns and trends in low- and middle-income countries; on aging in high-income countries including issues about compression of morbidity; on the links between early life experiences and late life outcomes; as well as on biomarker data from Mexico to study physiological patterns of health and their link with sociodemographic factors. Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez is also Associate Director of the UCLA California Center for Population Research (CCPR) and co-director of the T32 training grant at CCPR.
With Prof Alberto Palloni (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Dr. Guido Pinto Aguirre, Dr. Beltrán-Sánchez co-founded the Latin American Mortality Database, the largest data repository of mortality from 19 countries in Latin America (including data from around 1850). He has collaborated with researchers and institutions in México, Brazil, Germany, and Sweden.
He received the 2018 Early Achievement Award from the Population Association of America. This award is given biennially in even years to scholars who have made distinguished contributions to population research during the first ten years after receipt of the Ph.D.

Udry Lecture: Jennifer Manly: Social and Structural Drivers of Cognitive Aging and Dementia
2024-04-11 15:00 - 17:00
The 2024 J. Richard Udry Distinguished Lecture will be presented by Jennifer Manly, a Professor of Neuropsychology in Neurology at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute for Research in Aging and Alzheimer’s disease at Columbia University.
Her research focuses on mechanisms of inequalities in cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s Disease. Her research team has partnered with the Black and Latinx communities in New York City and around the United States to design and carry out investigations of structural and social forces across the lifecourse, such as educational opportunities, discrimination, and socioeconomic inequality, and how these factors relate to cognition and brain health later in life. She is the MPI of the Columbia Interdisciplinary Research Center on Alzheimer’s Disparities which focuses on mentoring early career scientists from minoritized backgrounds.
Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Alzheimer’s Association, and she has authored over 220 peer-reviewed publications and 10 chapters. She was the 2014 recipient of the Tony Wong Diversity Award for Outstanding Mentorship, was the recipient of the Paul Satz-International Neuropsychological Society Career Mentoring Award in 2020, and was named the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research Senior Mentor of the Year in 2022. Dr. Manly was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021. She served on the HHS Advisory Council on Alzheimer’s Research, Care and Services from 2011 – 2015 and is a current member of the National Advisory Council on Aging.
