Carolina Population Center

CPC Research Methods Series: Stories and Themes: A Framework for Qualitative Analysis
2015-10-30 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
Dr. Clare Barrington
Assistant Professor of Health behavior; and CPC Faculty Fellow
Barrington’s research examines social and structural influences on health and health behaviors, with a focus on HIV prevention and health care among female sex workers, men who have sex with men (MSM), and transgender women in Latin America and Latino migrants in the United States. She has been conducting community-based research in the Dominican Republic for over 15 years. In collaboration with the Centro de Orientacion e Investigacion Integral (COIN), she studied the social networks of male clients of female sex workers. Results from this study contributed to the growing literature on normative influences on sexual behavior within social networks and were also used in developing a pilot HIV prevention intervention aimed at male clients in the Dominican Republic (funded by the USAID/Academy for Educational Development). Most recently, with support from USAID, Barrington has been studying a cohort of 250 female sex workers living with HIV in Santo Domingo and their male partners. The aim is to improve understanding of the factors influencing their achievement of optimal HIV outcomes and to assess feasibility and initial effects of a multi-level intervention called Abriendo Puertas (Opening Doors). In Guatemala, she has collaborated with researchers from the Universidad del Valle (UVG) and the Centers for Disease control to examine and compare social networks among gay identifying and non-gay identifying MSM and transgender women. She is currently working with UVG to implement two PEPFAR-funded implementation science projects to pilot the use of social networks to promote HIV testing among MSM in Guatemala City and to evaluate a multi-level intervention for MSM living with HIV. In North Carolina, Barrington has been studying the intersection between social networks, migration and HIV among Mexican migrants. She currently leads the qualitative formative research and evaluation of a HRSA project to promote early detection and linkage to care for HIV among Mexican MSM and transgender women in North Carolina. Finally, Barrington is the qualitative researcher on several mixed-methods projects including a NIDA-funded longitudinal study of relationship disruption during incarceration and HIV risk among African American men in North Carolina, a quality improvement strategy to improve maternal and child health in Ghana, and an impact evaluation of cash transfer program in Malawi.
Barrington will continue to conduct mixed-methods research to improve understanding of the long-term experiences of people living with HIV in Latin America and Latinos in North Carolina. In the Dominican Republic her goal is to continue research with the Abriendo Puertas cohort to examine the role of substance use in HIV care and treatment among female sex workers living with HIV. She also has a grant pending to the adapt Abriendo Puertas for MSM. She is also interested in exploring how to improve employment opportunities for FSW, MSM and transgender women who are living with HIV in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and North Carolina as this has emerged as key structural determinant to positive HIV outcomes across settings. With her work with Latinos in North Carolina she aims to identify strategies to overcome the challenges of geographic dispersion and social isolation for engaging with Latinos living with HIV. She is also developing a new line of research focused on chronic disease in Latin America. She will conduct formative research in collaboration with two rural diabetes clinics to examine the epidemiological transition from the perspective of community health workers and explore social determinants of diabetes in these communities.

The Interrelationship between the Status of Singlehood and the Long-term Implications for Racial and Economic Inequality
2015-11-06 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Kris Marsh
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland
CPC Training Program Postdoctoral Scholar Alumna
Professor Kris 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 divided into three broad areas: the black middle class, the intersection of educational attainment and racial identification, and intra-racial health disparities. The common theme in her work is decomposing what it means to be black in America by focusing on intra-group variability in regards to class, space, identity, educational achievement, and mental health. Professor Marsh teaches undergraduate courses in Research Methods and Race Relations. In addition, she is interested in constructing specialized graduate and undergraduate seminars on Racial Residential Segregation, Black Middle Class, and Sociology of Education.

Summarizing Interactions between People, Places, and Genes
2015-11-13 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Jason Boardman
Professor of Sociology, University of Colorado Boulder
Director, Health & Society Program, Institute of Behavioral Science
Professor Jason Boardman’s research focuses on the social determinants of health with an emphasis on the gene-environment interactions related to health behaviors. He teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses in statistics, social demography, and the sociology of race and ethnicity.

CPC Research Methods Series: Cleaning Up After Missing Data: Pitfalls and Priorities
2015-11-20 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Amy Herring, Professor Of Biostatistics and CPC Faculty Fellow
Dr. Annie Green Howard, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics
Professor Amy Herring investigates factors related to adolescent sexual development and the demography of sexual minorities in the United States, studying trajectories of weight gain and cardiovascular health in a large population-based study in China, learning about factors related to human fertility among older mothers, improving the standards of care in neonatal intensive care units, studying occupational exposures and Parkinson’s-type symptoms, and investigating the roles of nutrition and exercise in healthy pregnancies.
Herring is a member of CPC’s methodological consultation unit and advises and collaborates extensively with CPC Fellows working in population science. She is actively involved in the scientific community and she serves on FDA’s Bone, Reproductive and Urologic Drugs Advisory Committee and as an associate editor or editorial board member of a number of journals, including Journal of the American Statistical Association and Environmental Health Perspectives.
Dr. Annie Green Howard graduated from UNC with a Ph.D. in May 2012. After working briefly as a postdoctoral research association at the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (CSCC) here at UNC, she took a position as an Assistant Professor in the Biostatistics Department.

Fertility and the Great Recession
2016-01-15 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Daniel Schneider
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley
Daniel Schneider is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2012, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at UC Berkeley from 2012-2014. Schneider’s research is focused on the family and social inequality.
His work has examined economic influences on family formation, including work on labor union membership and marriage and asset ownership and marriage. His current research examines how the economic shocks of the Great Recession have affected relationship quality, marriage, and fertility. A second line of research focuses on household finances and particularly on household financial fragility. Dr. Schneider uses the non-public versions of data from NCHS, in the Berkeley RDC, to support his research.

Household Decision-making, Gender and Groundnuts in Zambia
2016-01-22 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Siân Curtis
Associate Professor of Maternal & Child Health and CPC Faculty Fellow
Professor Curtis is a statistical demographer whose research and administrative efforts have focused on monitoring and evaluation of global population and health programs and family planning and reproductive health. As the past Director of the MEASURE Evaluation Project (from 2002-12), she provided technical direction and leadership to a portfolio of over 100 individual monitoring and evaluation activities in over 25 countries. Curtis continues to play an important role in the MEASURE Evaluation Project as a Senior Evaluation Specialist with responsibilities for designing and leading evaluations related to international health and food security projects. She has particular expertise in the design and analysis of complex surveys and previously worked as a senior analyst with the Demographic and Health Survey Project at Macro International.

Using Genomics to Prevent Adverse Drug Reactions in Global Populations
2016-01-29 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Christy Avery
UNC-CH Assistant Professor of Epidemiology
Christy Avery is an assistant professor who specializes in cardiovascular epidemiology. Her specific research areas include genetic epidemiology, pharmacogenomics, and translation-oriented approaches to assess the burden of cardiovascular diseases in diverse populations.

Can We Really End Malnutrition by 2030?: The Case For and Against
2016-02-04 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Lawrence Haddad
Senior Research Fellow
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Professor Lawrence Haddad is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). He was the Director of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex from 2004 to 2014. Prior to that he was a Division Director at IFPRI for 10 years and a Lecturer in Development Economics at the University of Warwick, UK. His main research interests are at the intersection of poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition. He is currently serving as the Co-Chair of the Global Nutrition Report, which has been downloaded over 60,000 times in the past year.

The Impact of Intensive Livestock Production on the Disease Ecology of Antibiotic Resistant Staphylococcus
2016-02-12 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Jill Stewart
UNC-CH Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences & Engineering
Professor Jill Stewart is an environmental health microbiologist who studies links between human and ecosystem health. She is developing novel tools to detect and track pathogens in the environment and she is applying these tools to evaluate how human activities affect the distribution of microbial contaminants. Current research projects include (1) epidemiology studies of bathing beaches impacted by non-point source pollution, (2) development of stress-response models for forecasting the impacts of development and climate change within watersheds, and (3) evaluating the evolution and dissemination of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the environment and in human and animal populations. These activities are leading to a greater understanding of how environmental conditions affect human health, and how humans themselves influence this process. At UNC, Dr. Stewart has a primary appointment in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, and is also serves as the Deputy Director of the Center for Galapagos Studies. She also has adjunct appointments in the Department of Marine Sciences and the Curriculum for the Environment & Ecology.

Selective Migration and the Health of Black Immigrants in the United States
2016-02-19 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Tod Hamilton
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Dr. Tod Hamilton is an Assistant Professor in the Princeton University Department of Sociology and a Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research. His research interests are in the field of demography, with an emphasis on immigration and health. His current research evaluates the relative importance of culture and selective migration in explaining differential patterns of stratification between U.S.-born and foreign-born individuals in the United States. Hamilton also explores the degree of health selection among contemporary immigrants to the United States as well as the role that social, economic, and health conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin play in explaining variation in their post-migration health in the United States.

Global Estimates of Children’s and Young Person’s Food Insecurity using the Gallup World Poll
2016-02-26 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Ashu Handa
UNC-CH Professor of Pubic Policy and CPC Faculty Fellow
Professor Handa is currently on-leave from UNC serving as Chief of Social & Economic Policy at UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti, Florence, Italy. At UNICEF he leads the Innocenti Report Card Series, UNICEF’s flagship publication on the well-being of children in rich countries. The 2014 Report Card, which Handa led, focused on the impact of the great recession on child poverty, and was featured in over 100 major media outlets including the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian (UK), Republica (Italy), El Pais (Spain), AP, and Reuters. The current Report Card, scheduled to be launched in March 2016, tracks bottom-end inequality among children in 41 rich countries over time, measured through children’s health, education and income. Professor Handa is one of eight researchers awarded access to the food security scale that the FAO incorporated into the Gallup World Poll through their Voices of the Hungry project
While at Innocenti, Dr. Handa continues to be actively engaged in CPC activities. Three CPC predoctoral trainees and four CPC Faculty Fellows visited Innocenti in 2013-14 for workshops and research collaboration. He also continues to actively manage his CPC-based grant portfolio as Principal Investigator on the Transfer Project (Transfer Project), a collaboration between CPC, UNICEF, FAO and Save the Children. The Transfer Project is a multi-country research initiative to study the impact of national cash transfer programs on poverty and human development.

Cash Transfers to Prevent HIV Infection: State of the Evidence and Implications for Programs
2016-03-04 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Audrey Pettifor
UNC-CH Associate Professor of Epidemiology and
CPC Faculty Fellow
Dr. Audrey Pettifor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. She has conducted research on sexual behavior HIV prevention in sub-Saharan Africa for close to twenty years with a particular focus on young women and structural interventions. Dr. Pettifor is PI of a large NIH funded randomized controlled trial in South Africa (HPTN 068) which examines the impact of a cash transfer conditional on school attendance on HIV incidence among young women.

Dietary Acculturation among Mexican-origin Children
2016-04-08 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Jenifer Van Hook
Professor of Sociology & Demography; Center Director, Population Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Jennifer Van Hook is Professor of Sociology and Demography and Center Director of the Population Research Institute at The Pennsylvania State University. She conducts demographic research on the settlement and incorporation patterns of U.S. immigrants, with one strand of her work focusing on illegal immigration. Her work also focuses on the social, economic, and health assimilation of immigrants and their descendants.
Dr. Van Hook received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, and has held positions at the Urban Institute and Bowling Green State University before joining the faculty at Penn State. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America and the Census Scientific Advisory Committee.

The Effect of Ethnic Enclaves on Job Matching and Wage Growth: Evidence using Co-worker and City of Birth Networks in the LEHD
2016-04-22 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Ted Mouw
UNC-CH Associate Professor of Sociology and CPC Faculty Fellow
In his current research on immigration, Professor Mouw is analyzing the effect of immigration on the labor market outcomes of native workers using a unique data set of restricted-access employer-employee data (the Longitudinal Employer Household Data “LEHD”) at the Triangle Census Research Data Center. The LEHD is an administrative data set on the quarterly earnings of all privately employed workers in participating states, constructed from unemployment insurance records. This project uses longitudinal data on over 93 million workers in 30 states from 1992-2008. By following these workers over time, Mouw is able to analyze the way that native workers adapt to immigration by modelling earnings growth and firm, industry, and geographic mobility.

Health Systems Decentralization in Rural Honduras: Little Evidence for Improvements in Maternal and Child Health
2016-09-09 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Elisabeth Root
Associate Professor of Geography; Associate Professor of Epidemiology; The Ohio State University
CPC Training Program Predoctoral Alumna
Professor Root’s research is situated at the intersection of geography and public health. Using spatial statistical methods and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), she integrates socioeconomic and environmental context into studies of disease processes and health behaviors to better understand geographical patterns of human health across diverse settings, examine how local and regional context drives these patterns of disease, and model the effect of major health and development interventions across these diverse settings. Dr. Root’s main approach involves collecting extensive survey and health data and combining these data with areal demographic/economic indicators and environmental data. She then use spatial statistical methods and GIS to quantify and assess the spatial/contextual factors which alter disease processes and programmatic effects. Her active research projects are located in Honduras, Bangladesh, and the Philippines as well as the U.S.

Religion and Depression in Adolescence
2016-09-16 12:00 - 13:00
Jane Fruehwirth, UNC-CH
Jane Cooley Fruehwirth is an economist with research interests in the determinants of social, economic and racial inequality. A central theme to her research is the role of social context in shaping disadvantage, particularly in the context of schools and friendships. She also studies education policies at the elementary and secondary school level that are aimed at improving disadvantaged students’ outcomes, such as teaching practice, accountability and grade retention. More recently, her research delves into the determinants of mental health in adolescence, particularly the role of religion and friends

Does Changing the Social Environment in Early Childhood Matter? Emerging Causal Evidence from Pakistan
2016-09-23 12:00 - 13:00
Joanna Maselko, UNC-CH
Joanna (‘Asia’) Maselko is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist whose research aims to identify mechanisms through which the social environment impacts the development of common neuropsychiatric disorders. Anchored in a life-course developmental framework, a large portion of her research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of risk and the role of the environment in altering socio-emotional and cognitive developmental trajectories.
Dr. Maselko is currently the PI of the SHARE CHILD study, a cluster RCT set in rural Pakistan, whose goal is to investigate mechanisms through which maternal depression, and its treatment, impacts child development in the first three years of life. A central question is to examine heterogeneity of treatment effects by social contextual factors such as socioeconomic status, family composition, and parenting.
A separate line of research focuses on religious engagement and health, with a special interest on how gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status affect this relationship over the lifecourse.
The majority of Dr. Maselko’s research is located in South Asia, with the broad goal of expanding the field of social and psychiatric epidemiology globally through anchoring research in a cross-cultural context and addressing disparities in global health

A sociogenomic approach to fertility: combining demography, sociology and molecular genetics
2016-09-30 12:00 - 13:00
Melinda Mills is the Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of the European Sociological Review. She leads the SOCIOGENOME and several other related projects, which combine demographic, sociological, biological and molecular genetic research to study the life course. Her interests also include the impact of nonstandard schedules on family life, assortative mating and internet dating and research methods.

Do food security interventions benefit women?: Gender and groundnuts in Zambia
2016-10-07 12:00 - 13:00
Siân Curtis, UNC-CH
Professor Curtis is a statistical demographer whose research and administrative efforts have focused on monitoring and evaluation of global population and health programs and family planning and reproductive health. As the past Director of the MEASURE Evaluation Project (from 2002-12), she provided technical direction and leadership to a portfolio of over 100 individual monitoring and evaluation activities in over 25 countries. Curtis continues to play an important role in the MEASURE Evaluation Project as a Senior Evaluation Specialist with responsibilities for designing and leading evaluations related to international health and food security projects, and is director of the Family Planning Country Action Process Evaluation Project. She has particular expertise in the design and analysis of complex surveys and previously worked as a senior analyst with the Demographic and Health Survey Project at Macro International.

The Individual’s Choice of Facility for Maternal Health and Family Planning Services in a Dense Urban Environment: The Case of Senegal
2016-10-14 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. David Guilkey
UNC-CH Professor of Economics and CPC Faculty Fellow
Professor Guilkey is an applied econometrician with a microeconomics focus. Much of his work has involved the use of large survey data sets that involve limited dependent variables and the presence of endogenous right-hand-side variables.
Dr. Ilene Speizer
UNC-CH Research Professor of Maternal & Child Health and
CPC Faculty Fellow
CPC Training Program Postdoctoral Alumna
Professor Speizer is trained as a demographer and evaluation researcher, and has led research and evaluation studies on family planning, HIV prevention, intimate partner violence, and adolescent reproductive health programs in sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, and India. She is currently the co-Principal Investigator and Technical Deputy Director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded Measurement, Learning, and Evaluation (MLE) for the Urban Reproductive Health Initiative project.

Sex, Gender, and Health
2016-10-28 12:00 - 13:00
Susan Short
Professor of Sociology and Director of the Population Studies and Training Center
The Brown University
Dr. Short’s research examines changing social and demographic environments and their implications for family dynamics, gender, health, and well-being.
She has examined economic reform and population policy in China, the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Lesotho, and changes in the organization of women’s work and parenting in the U.S. Short’s research is characterized by diverse methodologies, including demographic, ethnographic, spatial, and genomic approaches. Her recent work integrates social and biological perspectives to investigate the processes through which social experiences are embodied over the life course, producing variation in health and well-being.

Mothers, Children, and Child Care in the U.S.
2016-11-04 12:00 - 13:00
Robert Crosnoe
Professor and Chair of Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin
Abstract:
The state of early child care in a society—how accessible it is to families in need, how good it is for children—is a core component of the health, wellbeing, and productivity of the population, but the state of early child care in the U.S. is characterized by considerable inequality. This presentation draws on several years of quantitative research with the NICHD Study of Early Child Care to show how a variety of family disadvantages translate into disadvantages in the early child care market, undermining the future prospects of children and mothers, and then explores media coverage of this long-running federal study to demonstrate how cultural debates about maternal employment, intensive mothering, and the best interests of children slow progress in providing high-quality child care to families.
Bio:
Robert Crosnoe is the C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair #4 at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is Chair of the Department of Sociology and a faculty member in the Population Research Center. Prior to coming to Texas, he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Crosnoe conducts mixed-methods research on the connections among health, child/adolescent development, and education and the contributions of these connections to socioeconomic and immigration-related inequalities in American society. This work has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Science Foundation, Institute of Education Sciences, National Institute of Justice, William T. Grant Foundation, and Foundation for Child Development. His books include Mexican Roots, American Schools: Helping Mexican Immigrant Children Succeed (Stanford University Press), Fitting In, Standing Out: Navigating the Social Challenges of High School to Get an Education (Cambridge University Press), and Asset or Distraction: Physical Attractiveness and the Accumulation of Social and Human Capital from Adolescence and Young Adulthood (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development with Rachel Gordon), and his new books are Healthy Learners: A Whole Child Approach to Disparities in Early Education (Teachers College Press with Claude Bonazzo and Nina Wu), and Debating Early Child Care: The Relationship between Developmental Science and the Media (Cambridge University Press with Tama Leventhal). Dr. Crosnoe is Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Collaborative on Development in Context and President-Elect of the Society for Research on Adolescence, serves on the Governing Councils for the Society for Research in Child Development and Council on Contemporary Families, and just completed his term as Deputy Editor of Journal of Marriage and Family.

Mixed Methods in Population Research
2016-11-11 12:00 - 13:00
Clare Barrington,
UNC-CH Associate Professor of Health Behavior and CPC Faculty Fellow
Professor Barrington’s research examines social and structural influences on health and health behaviors, with a focus on HIV prevention and health care among female sex workers, men who have sex with men (MSM), and transgender women in Latin America and Latino migrants in the United States. She has been conducting community-based research in the Dominican Republic for over 15 years. In collaboration with the Centro de Orientacion e Investigacion Integral (COIN), she studied the social networks of male clients of female sex workers. Most recently, with support from USAID, Dr. Barrington has been studying a cohort of 250 female sex workers living with HIV in Santo Domingo and their male partners. The aim is to improve understanding of the factors influencing their achievement of optimal HIV outcomes, and to assess feasibility and initial effects of a multi-level intervention called Abriendo Puertas (Opening Doors). In North Carolina, Barrington has been studying the intersection between social networks, migration, and HIV among Mexican migrants. She currently leads the qualitative formative research and evaluation of a HRSA project to promote early detection and linkage to care for HIV among Mexican MSM and transgender women in North Carolina.

Contraception, a Social Vaccine: Part I
2016-11-18 12:00 - 13:00
Amy TsuiProfessor, Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health
John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Amy Tsui is Professor in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health. She directed the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 2002-2013 and prior to that was director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests relate to contraception, fertility and related reproductive health behaviors in low-income settings. She serves as a Senior Technical Advisor to the Performance Monitoring and Accountability 2020 project which conducts rapid monitoring surveys of family planning indicators in 11 countries using smart-phone technology. She also headed the Family Health and Wealth Study, a longitudinal study of nearly 5000 families in six national peri-urban settings in Africa. She has published on the evolution of the international family planning movement, estimation of maternal deaths averted by contraceptive use, and variation in unwanted fertility with contraceptive service access in developing countries. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and serves or has served on a various scientific review and advisory committees of federal and international agencies and boards of non-governmental organizations.

Quantification of Biological Aging
2016-12-02 12:00 - 13:00
Dan Belsky
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Duke University
Jacobs Foundation Research Fellow
Dan is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine and the Social Science Research Institute and Jacobs Foundation Research Fellow (2016-2018). Dan works at the intersection of genetics, the social and behavioral sciences, and public health. His work brings together discoveries from the cutting edge of genome science and longitudinal data from population-based cohorts to identify mechanisms that cause accelerated health decline in older age. Dan’s work takes a life-span approach that encompasses research on cohorts of children, young and middle-aged adults, and older adults. His goal is is to understand why socioeconomically disadvantaged populations suffer increased morbidity in older age and earlier mortality, and to devise strategies for intervention to mitigate these health inequalities.

The CPC legacy: integration of biological and social perspectives on health
2017-01-13 12:00 - 13:00
Linda Adair, PhD
The value of multidisciplinary and longitudinal approaches to maternal and child health
Linda Adair’s research focus has a strong life-course focus, spanning from explorations of determinants of birth outcomes, to infant feeding and child growth patterns to multidimensional pathways to healthy aging in adults. Her work has taken her from the Philippines (where she leads the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey), and China for the study of the emergence of cardiometabolic disease risk, to South Africa, Malawi, and Rwanda, where her work is focused on prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
Penny Gordon-Larsen, PhD
Linking Environment, Biology, Behavior to Cardiometabolic Disease in Population Research
Penny Gordon-Larsen, PhD, is professor and associate chair for research in the department of nutrition at UNC. For over 20 years her work has focused on obesity and its cardiometabolic disease complications, spanning genetics and the gut microbiome to behavior to environmental research. At the core of this work is the focus on the interplay between environment, biology, behavior and disease in relation to global population health.
Kathleen Mullan Harris, PhD
Social, Behavioral, and Biological Linkages in Health across the Life Course
Kathleen Mullan Harris is the James E. Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at UNC. Her research focuses on social inequality and health with particular interests in family, the transition to adulthood, and social policy. She leads an integrative research program in Add Health to understand the social, environmental, behavioral, biological and genetic linkages in social stratification pathways that lead to health disparities across the life course.
Barry M. Popkin, PhD
An Economist’s Foray into Global Nutrition and related biomedical areas
Barry M. Popkin, PhD, is the W. R. Kenan, Jr. distinguished professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). While initially his research work focused on the economics of women’s work and how time constraints were linked with major household health concerns, his long-term interests have focused on the study of the dynamic shifts in our environment as they affect dietary intake and physical activity patterns and trends and obesity and other nutrition-related noncommunicable diseases –all from a more social science economics perspective.

Residential segregation, political power, and preterm birth in the U.S. 2008-2010
2017-01-27 12:00 - 13:00
This event is co-sponsored with the Triangle Research Data Center (TRDC)
Claire Margerison-Zilko, Michigan State University
Claire Margerison-Zilko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Margerison-Zilko’s research examines the relationships between macro- and individual-level social and economic factors and maternal, infant, and child health with a focus on understanding the determinants of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in maternal and child health. With funding from NIH/NICHD, Dr. Margerison-Zilko is currently examining the impact of the recent Great Recession on adverse birth outcomes in the U.S. She was also recently awarded a K01 Mentored Career Development Award from NIH/NHLBI to examine links between women’s pregnancy health and later-life race and socioeconomic disparities in cardiovascular disease (CVD). Another active area of research examines the relationship between perinatal health and aspects of the residential environment such as neighborhood socioeconomic history and racial residential segregation. Dr. Margerison-Zilko has a PhD in Epidemiology an MPH in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Exemptions from Childhood Vaccination Requirements: A Geographic Analysis
2017-02-10 12:00 - 13:00
Paul L. Delamater, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University
Dr. Paul Delamater is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University. He will be joining the Department of Geography at UNC Chapel Hill in 2017. Dr. Delamater’s research uses Geographic Information Systems and spatial/statistical analysis to better understand the geographic aspects of population health issues, broadly focusing on health-related behavior and health care utilization. His current research examines non-medical exemptions from childhood vaccination requirements in the United States and the corresponding risk of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks. Another active area of Dr. Delamater’s research is integrating evidence-based approaches in health care planning and regulation. He has provided scientific support to Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services in recent modifications of the state’s policies governing health care services access and availability.

Friends, genes, and schools: Evidence from Add Health
2017-02-17 12:00 - 13:00
Ben Domingue, Assistant Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education
Ben Domingue is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. He has two areas of active research. The first focuses on statewide standardized test scores and their uses, particularly how test scores are used in statistical models that evaluate the effectiveness of teachers and schools. On a technical level, he also is interested in the extent to which test scores and the data from which they are drawn demonstrate certain desirable properties. The second area of research focuses on the integration of genetic data into social science research. In particular, he is interested in understanding the genetic architecture of educational attainment and the way in which schools can and do moderate the association between genes and educational attainment.

Farmer Cognitive Function and Agricultural Productivity Among Farmers in Bahia, Brazil
2017-02-24 12:00 - 13:00
Leah VanWey, Professor of Environment and Society and Sociology, Brown University
Leah VanWey is a social demographer and environmental social scientist. She currently has two lines of research. One line studies population change, socioeconomic development, and environmental change associated with the expansion of mechanized agriculture in Brazil. The second is examining household responses to a payment for reforestation program in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, together with the social and environmental impacts of the program. She is committed to interdisciplinary research, and has worked with anthropologists, geographers, demographers, sociologists, urban planners, historians, geoscientists and ecologists at various times. At Brown, Professor VanWey has served as Senior Deputy Director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and Associate Director of the Population Studies and Training Center. She currently serves as Associate Provost for Academic Space. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina, where she was a trainee in the Carolina Population Center, and has previously taught at Indiana University
