Do food security interventions benefit women?: Gender and groundnuts in Zambia
2016-10-07 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
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

Demographic Trends in sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of Family Planning Programs
2017-03-02 15:00 - 16:00
J. Richard Udry Distinguished Lecture
John Bongaarts, Ph.D.
John Bongaarts is Vice President and Distinguished Scholar of the Population Council where he has been employed since 1973. He holds a PhD in Physiology and Biomedical Engineering from the University of Illinois and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Population Dynamics at the John’s Hopkins School of Public Health. Bongaarts’ research has focused on a range of population and health issues, including population projections, determinants of fertility and mortality trends, the demographic impact of the AIDS epidemic and population policy options in both the developed and developing world. He has published over 200 papers, chapters and books. Honors include the Robert J. Lapham Award and the Mindel Sheps Award from the Population Association of America, and the Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and is a Laureate of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.

Race, Nativity, Aging & Health: Critical Demography and Life Course Perspectives
2017-03-24 12:00 - 13:00
Tyson Brown, Assistant Professor of Sociology & Director of the Center for Biobehavioral Health Disparities Research, Duke University
Dr. Brown is an assistant professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Biobehavioral Health Disparities Research at Duke University. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—where he was also a trainee at the CPC—prior to completing a NIH/NIA postdoctoral fellowship at Duke. Brown’s research draws on life course perspectives and panel data to understand racial inequalities in health and wealth trajectories in middle and late life. He also studies how racial inequalities are gendered and classed, and the extent to which socio-environmental and psychosocial mechanisms across the life course explain within- and between-group inequalities. His research and training have been supported by funding from the NIH and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Machine Learning in Population Research
2017-03-31 12:00 - 13:00
Chirayath M. Suchindran, Ph.D., Professor, Biostatistics, UNC-Chapel Hill
Suchindran’s recent publications include a paper that demonstrates the use of mixture models with linear predictors to identify incorrect gestational age in US birth certificates, a regression analysis of interval censored complex survey data, an examination of the redistribution techniques to identify the errors in causes of death data, a paper in Demography that demonstrates the use of event history data to obtain estimates of multistate life table parameters and their standard errors and a paper dealing with the appraisal of biomarker selection methods applicable to HIV/AIDS research.
Suchindran’s current, substantive research projects include genetic by context influence on trajectories of adolescent health risk behaviors, effects of cash transfer and community mobilization on HIV incidence and gender norms among South African young women, effect of neighborhood SES on coronary heart disease burden in communities and obesity development and CVD risk factor clustering in Filipino women and offspring, and promoting safe sex among HIV+ women.
Suchindran’s work will focus on developing methods for data analysis and conduct of collaborative research with CPC researchers that have been initiated currently. The methodological focus will be on the issues related to complex sampling designs and estimation of random effects models with specific complex survey designs with different modes of data collection, currently being proposed to collect the Add Health Survey wave V. Suchindran will also pursue his research in developing indices of longevity based on Kullback-Leiber divergence measures that involve moments of order three and above (for example, skewness and kurtosis). Suchindran will also join in the new initiatives in the Department of Biostatistics in developing state-of-the-art methodology for analyzing ‘big data’ (for example, machine learning techniques for predictive modeling, dimension reduction) with focus on demographic research. On the collaborative research side, Suchindran will continue his involvement in several intervention studies where the data collections are about to end. Suchindran will also provide statistical help, if necessary, by developing methods for data analysis for CPC researchers.

Demographic Dynamics and Population Responses to Varying Natural Hazard Exposures Across the U.S., 1970-2014
2017-04-07 12:00 - 13:00
Sara Curran, Professor of International Studies, Professor of Public Policy & Governance & Professor of Sociology, University of Washington
I serve as director of the UW’s Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology. Recently and delightedly, I was selected to join the Executive Council of UW President Ana Mari Cauce’s new Population Health Initiative. This exciting endeavor provides an outstanding opportunity to amplify UW’s substantial health research, training, and applications across the entire campus on behalf of local and global healthy outcomes.
I research gender, migration, and environment in developing countries. Current projects include social change and migration, climate change and migration, and disaster disparities. I am writing a book, Demographic Dynamics and Development Transformations in Thailand. I have authored work that appears in Demography, Population and Development Review, Social Science Research, Teaching Sociology, Journal of International Women’s Studies, and Journal of Marriage and the Family.

Population, Health, and Environment Transitions in the Developing World
2017-04-21 12:00 - 13:00
David López-Carr, Professor of Department of Geography, UC Santa Barbara
I am co-Direct of the University of California Global Health Institute (UCGHI) Center of Expertise on Planetary Health. I am Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I direct the Human-Environment Dynamics Lab (HED) and lead the population, health, and environment research group for the Broom Center for Demography. I have lived, worked, and traveled in over 70 countries and speak Spanish, as well as some Portuguese, Italian, French, and very rudimentary Q’eqchí Maya. My research focuses on links among population, health, rural development, agriculture, and marine and forest resource use and conservation through ongoing projects in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I have authored over 130 scientific publications. My research is conducted with colleagues and students thanks to several million dollars in funding from over 50 fellowships, grants, and awards from NASA, NSF, NIH, the Mellon and Fulbright Foundations, and numerous other sources. I am a Fellow of the NAS’ Kavli Frontiers of Science and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Before co-directing the Center for Planetary Health, I was an associate director for the UCGHI Center of Expertise on Migration and Health and Director of UCSB’s Latin American and Iberian Studies, where I was awarded outstanding graduate mentor. During 2015-15, I chaired the UC Faculty Senate Committee on Affirmative Action, Equity, and Diversity (UCAAD) and remain on several related committees in which I have helped author various plans, proposals and responses regarding policy as it relates to diversity and equity in higher education across the UCs.

A Cautionary Tale about Parental Involvement in Children's Schooling: How Parental Involvement Really Works
2017-09-08 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Angel Harris, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, Duke University
Professor Harris’s research interests include social inequality, policy, and education. He has published several articles and book chapters on the racial achievement gap that have appeared in various academic journals such as Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Social Science Quarterly, the Annals of the American and Political Social Science, and Sex Roles. Dr. Angel is the author of Kids Don’t Want to Fail (Harvard University Press), which provides an in-depth quantitative assessment of whether youth from marginalized groups purposefully resist schooling in both the United States and the United Kingdom. He is also the author of The Broken Compass: Parental Involvement with Children’s Education (Harvard University Press), which examines the link between parenting and youths’ schooling outcomes.
Professor Harris also serves as Director of the Research on Education and Development of Youth (REDY) Program.

Uncovering the Various Dimensions of Nutritional Disparities: Innovative Approaches and Public Health Implications
2017-09-15 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Jennifer Poti, UNC-CH Research Assistant Professor, Nutrition
Dr. Poti is a nutritional epidemiologist interested in understanding the complexities of the US food supply, purchasing patterns, and dietary intake. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Johns Hopkins University and earned a PhD in Nutrition with a minor in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been at the Carolina Population Center as a member of the Global Food Research Program at UNC since 2010.
Dr. Poti’s research focuses on how shifts in the American diet away from whole foods and home cooking toward highly processed foods and foods prepared away-from-home (e.g. fast food and restaurant foods) are related to dietary quality and obesity among US children and adults. In addition, her work has focused on monitoring the US food supply and documenting long-term dietary trends among Americans. She is currently studying sources of sodium, saturated fat, and sugar in household food and beverage purchases and evaluating changes in the nutrient content of purchases that may occur as a result of manufacturers’ efforts to reformulate packaged foods and introduce new products. She also currently helps to lead her team’s Crosswalk project, which links nutrition label data to national dietary intake surveys in order to examine nutritional changes in the US food supply and assess potential impact on dietary intake of Americans. Dr. Poti’s work is particularly focused on understanding long-term food purchasing behaviors and diets within critical subpopulations (particularly non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, and low-income children and adults) who are at higher risk for obesity and obesity-related cardiometabolic disease. Her research evaluates the differential effects that recent changes in the US food supply have on diet disparities in the US.
Dr. Poti’s research has included successful interdisciplinary collaboration with experts in nutrition, epidemiology, and economics. She has formal training in epidemiology and analytic methods including regression modeling, analysis of categorical data and time-to-event analysis, advanced methods specifically in nutritional epidemiology and obesity epidemiology, and econometric modeling methods including longitudinal analysis of panel data and instrumental variable techniques. Dr. Poti’s research experience has provided her with a strong skill set for assessing and representing dietary data, including analysis at the nutrient, food, or food group level; creation of food grouping systems; and dietary pattern analysis using a priori indices or data-driven approaches. She has extensive experience working with large, population-based nationally representative sources of dietary data, including the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) dietary intake data and the Homescan commercial food purchase data. Dr. Poti’s published research produced results with important policy implications, including studies that helped to inform development of the USDA’s nutrition standards for the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs as well as work that has been used to develop food procurement standards for the county of San Diego, CA.

300 Million Test Scores and What Do We Know? Educational Opportunity and Inequality in the US
2017-09-22 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Sean Reardon,
Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education and Professor (by courtesy) of Sociology
Director, Stanford Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training Program in Quantitative Education Policy Analysis
Sean Reardon is the endowed Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education and is Professor (by courtesy) of Sociology at Stanford University. His research focuses on the causes, patterns, trends, and consequences of social and educational inequality, the effects of educational policy on educational and social inequality, and in applied statistical methods for educational research. In addition, he develops methods of measuring social and educational inequality (including the measurement of segregation and achievement gaps) and methods of causal inference in educational and social science research. He teaches graduate courses in applied statistical methods, with a particular emphasis on the application of experimental and quasi-experimental methods to the investigation of issues of educational policy and practice. Sean received his doctorate in education in 1997 from Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a recipient of the William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award, the National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Of Men and Microbes: Social Determinants of the Microbiome
2017-09-29 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Jenn Dowd is currently Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London. She is also Research Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the CUNY School of Public Health, City University of New York, where she was a faculty member from 2008-2016. Her research covers topics in social epidemiology and population health focusing on the interaction of social and biological factors over the life course. Specific projects include understanding the role of stress and immune function in health inequalities, links between infectious and chronic disease, trends in educational attainment and mortality, and the impact of long-term obesity on health and functioning.
Dr. Dowd received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2004 with a focus on economics and demography from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Office of Population Research. From 2006-2008, Dr. Dowd was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar in the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health at the University of Michigan

Activity Spaces and Youth Development: Preliminary Findings from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context Study
2017-10-06 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Christopher Browning, Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State University
Christopher Browning is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and an affiliate of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. His research focuses on neighborhood and activity space influences on health and adolescent development, emphasizing the causes and consequences of neighborhood social processes such as collective efficacy and network dynamics. He is the Principal Investigator of the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study.

Analyzing Longitudinal Qualitative Data: Stories of How and Why
2017-10-13 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Clare Barrington, UNC-CH Associate Professor of Health Behavior, CPC Faculty Fellow
Professor Barrington’s research examines social and structural influences on health and health behaviors, with a focus on HIV among female sex workers (FSW), 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. She led a mixed methods study of the social networks of the steady male partners of FSW in the Dominican Republic and most recently has been conducting research to understand and address social and structural determinants of outcomes along the HIV continuum of care among key populations in Santo Domingo. She is also leading an implementation science research project to decentralize HIV care and treatment for MSM in Guatemala City. In North Carolina, she has been studying the intersection between social networks, migration, and HIV among Mexican migrants. Dr. Barrington currently leads the qualitative formative research and evaluation of a study to promote early detection and linkage to care for HIV among Mexican MSM and transgender women in North Carolina. In addition to her HIV-focused work, Dr. Barrington leads the qualitative component of several mixed methods impact evaluations of health and development programs in Ghana and Malawi.

Mother's Employment Patterns and Consequences for Adolescent Outcomes
2017-10-27 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald is Professor of Sociology, as well as a faculty member in the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2011. Prior to her appointment at Harvard she was a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. Her research takes a demographic approach to the study of social stratification. Much of her work focuses on the work-family intersection. She has published (with Margaret Gough) several articles on the ways in which earnings and employment shape women’s time in household labor. Her current research in this area explores the effect of marriage and parenthood on workers’ wages.
Another area of her research examines the influence of parental wealth on adult outcomes, including the role of parental wealth in explaining the Black-White wealth gap. She has also written (with Kerwin Charles and Erik Hurst) on assortative mating by parental wealth.
She is also the author (with Yu Xie) of Is American Science in Decline? (2012), which documents trends in the size of the American scientific workforce, public attitudes toward science, youth interest in science, the production of scientific degrees, and transitions to scientific employment, in addition to evaluating the position of American science on the international scene.

Data Collection for Network Sampling Approaches for Rare and Hard to Reach Populations: Lessons Learned
2017-11-03 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Giovanna Merli (Professor of Public Policy and Global Heath, Duke University)
M. Giovanna Merli is Professor of Public Policy, Sociology and Global Health in the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University. She is also the Director of the Duke Population Research Center (DPRC). She holds a PhD in demography from the University of Pennsylvania. Before going to Duke, she was on the faculty of the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Merli has a strong background in the design, conduct and analyses of surveys fielded among Chinese populations in China and Chinese immigrant destinations. Her NIH-funded data collection efforts have relied on conventional probability sampling designs as well as venue-based and link-tracing sampling approaches to recruit samples of rare and hidden populations. She has also designed ego-centric network modules for the Chinese general population, which she has used to estimate the behavioral, social and relational determinants of prevalence of HIV and other STIs in China. In recent work, she has evaluated the performance of Respondent-Driven Sampling among populations at risk of HIV/STIs. Currently, in collaboration with Ted Mouw, she is fielding, testing and evaluating an innovative sampling approach for rare populations, Network Sampling with Memory, among Chinese immigrant populations in the U.S., Tanzania and France.
Dr. Ted Mouw (Associate Professor of Sociology; CPC Faculty Fellow)
Mouw’s current research on social mobility focuses on factors that affect the upward mobility of low wage workers. In his paper with Arne Kalleberg, “Stepping Stone versus Dead End Jobs: Occupational Pathways out of Working Poverty in the United States, 1996-2012”, he uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to test whether the accumulation of task-specific skills increases the rate of upward mobility for low-wage workers. In a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, he is linking the SIPP data to county-level data on labor demand shocks in order to analyze the role that structural factors play in the upward mobility of low-wage workers. This research builds on previous work that analyzed trends in between-occupation inequality and the impact of job mobility on changes in inequality. In the next five years, he plans to extend this work into a book-length project on working poverty and the social mobility of low-wage workers.

Framing the HIV Response For Those Most at Risk: The Granularity Challenge
2017-11-10 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Sharon Weir (UNC-CH Research Assistant Professor of Epidemiology; CPC Faculty Fellow)
Professor Weir’s research interests relate to methods that identify and characterize local sexual and injecting drug use networks in resource poor settings. This information is key in preventing the spread of HIV. Not only are many people asymptomatic, which contributes to a hidden epidemic, but persons occupying central positions in HIV transmission networks are often members of mobile, stigmatized, and hard-to-reach populations. Because many people do not know their HIV status and because many of those who are infected are hidden, there is a need for methods based on sound epidemiologic science that use technology appropriate to the local setting to uncover local transmission networks in a way that leads to effective, ethical, and evidence-based prevention.

From ‘Opt Out’ to Blocked Out: The Challenges for Labor Market Re-Entry After Family-Related Employment Lapses
2017-11-17 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Kate Weisshaar (UNC-CH Assistant Professor of Sociology; CPC Faculty Fellow)
Kate Weisshaar is a sociologist whose research focuses on gender and economic stratification processes within families, workplaces, and society, with an interest in developing critical tests of causal processes by leveraging data and quantitative methods. She is particularly interested in how macro-level inequalities in the labor force are reproduced through micro- and meso-level processes in the workplace, in families, and in the work-family intersection. Her recent work examined labor market outcomes associated with intermittent labor force participation, with a specific examination of how periods of unemployment or “opting out” of work for family reasons affect labor market outcomes upon re-entry, such as hiring prospects, wages, and occupational prestige. Kate received her PhD in Sociology from Stanford University, and has been an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at UNC-Chapel Hill and a Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center since 2016.

When Should Researchers Use Inferential Statistics When Analyzing Data on Full Populations?
2017-12-01 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Rob Warren (Professor of Sociology, University of Minnesota)
Professor Warren is a sociologist, demographer, population health scholar, and education policy researcher with experience and expertise in the collection, production, and dissemination of large-scale data products for research on health, aging, education, and labor force outcomes. He is currently involved in the construction of the new 100% count historical Census data sets for IPUMS. Dr. Warren has worked intensively on WLS data infrastructure since his first week in graduate school; for example, he designed and programmed the employment history and job characteristics modules of every survey of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) administered since the mid-1990s. Dr. Warren also serves as the Director of the Minnesota Population Center.

Integrating Behavior, Biology and Environment to Study Complex Pathways from Urbanization to Health
2018-01-12 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Annie Green Howard, Clinical Assistant Professor of Department of Biostatistics, UNC-Chapel Hill
Annie Green Howard has considerable expertise in high-dimensional exposure modeling, longitudinal and multilevel modeling, multivariate, pathway and structural equation modeling, latent variables, and missing data. A central theme of her research has been modeling of longitudinal exposures and outcomes, with substantive focus in the area of cardiovascular disease and obesity. She serves as the lead biostatistician on several projects at the Carolina Population center including research investigating complex pathways to cardiovascular disease in both Add Health and the China Health and Nutrition Study.

CANCELED: Beyond Discrimination: Why Vigilance Matters for Population Health
2018-01-19 12:00 - 13:00
Due to the travel uncertainty associated with the recent snowfall and winter weather, the January 19 CPC interdisciplinary seminar is cancelled. We plan to reschedule Professor Lee’s talk during fall 2018.
Dr. Hedwig Lee, Professor of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
Hedwig (Hedy) Lee is a Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her BS in Policy Analysis from Cornell University in 2003 and her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. After receiving her PhD, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan, School of Public Health from 2009 to 2011. She also holds a courtesy joint appointment at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis and is an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington Department of Sociology in Seattle. She is broadly interested in the social determinants and consequences of population health and health disparities. Her recent work examines the impact of chronic stress on health and health disparities.
