Carolina Population Center

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.

Krystale Littlejohn: Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics
2022-11-11 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On November 11, 2022, Krystale Littlejohn will present “Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Littlejohn‘s work examines race, gender, and reproduction. She is particularly interested in investigating how cultural categories shape behavior in intimate relationships and examining the consequences of these behaviors for health outcomes. Her work has been published in Demography, Gender & Society, and Journal of Health and Social Behavior, among other outlets. Her research has been supported by funding from the ASA Minority Fellowship Program, the American Association of University Women, and the Society of Family Planning. She is currently working on a book project, Just Get on the Pill: Gender, Compulsory Birth Control, and Reproductive Injustice (under contract with University of California Press), where she uses in-depth interviews with young women to examine how taken-for-granted ideas about gender structure inequality in pregnancy prevention.

Bonnie Shook-Sa: Survey Sampling Methods in HIV Research
2022-11-18 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On November 18, 2022, Bonnie Shook-Sa will present “Survey Sampling Methods in HIV Research” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Bonnie Shook-Sa is an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics at UNC. She is affiliated with the Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center (CSCC) and is a participating faculty member with the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) Biostatistics Core. She has over 12 years of experience in collaborative public health research and statistical methods development. Her research interests include survey sampling and causal inference methods. Her collaborative research has spanned numerous areas of public health, including infectious disease (HIV and SARS-CoV-2), victimization and criminal justice, drug use, and tobacco consumption.

Book launch: "A Dream Defaulted: The Student Loan Crisis Among Black Borrowers"
2022-11-29 17:30 - 19:30 | Washington Duke Inn, Duke University, 3001 Cameron Blvd, Durham, 27705, United States

Jessica Halliday Hardie: Best Laid Plans: Women Coming of Age in Uncertain Times
2023-01-13 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On January 13, 2023, Jessica Halliday Hardie will present “Best Laid Plans: Women Coming of Age in Uncertain Times” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Jessica Hardie is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Family Demography and Individual Development at Penn State University.
She specializes in the areas of sociology of education, inequality, family, health, and the transition to adulthood, and her research explores factors that explain the intergenerational transmission of inequality at several stages in the life course. She has conducted qualitative and quantitative research on adolescent social capital, race and racism in high school, economic resources and romantic relationship quality among cohabiting and married couples, and the relationship between maternal health and child wellbeing. She is currently working on a longitudinal qualitative study of class and race differences in young women’s transitions to adulthood, with attention to how they balance work, school, and family life during this period.

Todd Jensen: Building a Productive Future for Family-Structure Research
2023-01-20 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On January 20, 2023, Todd Jensen will present “Building a Productive Future for Family-Structure Research” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Dr. Jensen is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, the Associate Director for Research in the Collaborative for Implementation Practice, and a Family Research and Engagement Specialist in the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Jensen’s scholarship focuses on promoting family well-being in diverse contexts; strengthening family-serving systems; and centering equity in family research, practice, and policy. Specifically, Dr. Jensen’s work attends to families experiencing relationship transitions and shifts in parental structure; family maltreatment prevention among military-connected families; promoting the use of data and evidence in family-serving systems; understanding the role of trusting relationships in optimizing the uptake of effective programs and practices in family-serving systems; advocating for inclusive definitions of family; and centering equity in the theory and methods used to study and support families.
Dr. Jensen’s professional activities are connected to more than 5.2 million dollars in extramural funding, including support from the National Institutes of Health, The Duke Endowment, the William T. Grant Foundation, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Jensen is co-founder and co-chair of the Diverse Family Structures Focus Group of the National Council on Family Relations, which has amassed over 130 scholars across the country and globe aiming to align research, practice, and policy with the complex realities of family relationships. He is also the leader of the Family Measurement Node and Steering Committee Member of the Life Course Intervention Research Network. As an award-winning educator, Dr. Jensen specializes in delivering graduate-level content related to family dynamics, child development, program evaluation, and advanced quantitative methodology.

Arianna Marie Planey
2023-02-03 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On February 3, 2023, Arianna Marie Planey will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Arrianna Marie Planey, PhD, MA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health and a Fellow in the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. She is a health/medical geographer with expertise in measuring and conceptualizing health care access, health and healthcare equity, and spatial epidemiology. Her research and teaching focuses include the application of spatial analytic/statistical/epidemiologic methods to study interactions between health(care) policies, healthcare access and utilization and underlying, population-level health inequities, and identify points of intervention at structural- and system-levels.
Dr. Planey’s ongoing research includes collaborative studies of birth outcomes (preterm birth and low birth weight) among Black immigrants in segregated neighborhoods, spatial mismatch by race and gender among workers in US metro areas, and the disparate effects of rural hospital closures on acute care access.

Stan Ahalt and Jay Aikat, UNC Data Science Institute
2023-02-10 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On February 10, 2023, Stan Ahalt and Jay Aikat of the UNC Data Science Institute will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Stanley C. Ahalt is the Inaugural Dean of the UNC School of Data Science and Society (SDSS) and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also serves as Executive Adviser and Domain Scientist for Team Science at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at UNC and as Associate Director of Informatics and Data Science (IDSci) in the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS), UNC’s CTSA program.
Jay Aikat is the Senior Associate Dean of the School of Data Science and Society, and the Chief Operating Officer (COO) at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), a research institute within UNC-Chapel Hill. She is also a Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill since Dec 2011.

Caroline Thompson: Modernizing Metrics of Population Cancer Burden
2023-02-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On February 17, 2023, Caroline Thompson (Epidemiology) will present “Modernizing Metrics of Population Cancer Burden” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Thompson‘s substantive research aims to describe and understand population-level patterns of cancer screening and diagnosis and to identify drivers of disparities in cancer-related healthcare delivery and outcomes across populations. Methodologically, she is interested in improving the valid research-use of complex, longitudinal sources of routine healthcare data (e.g., medical claims and electronic health records) and the use of quantitative bias analysis to evaluate the impact of suspected sources of systematic error in observational research.

Larissa Jennings Mayo-Wilson
2023-02-24 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On February 24, 2023, Larissa Jennings Mayo-Wilson will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Larissa Jennings Mayo-Wilson, PhD MHS, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Department of Maternal and Child Health at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. She is a sexual and reproductive health behavioral scientist with methodological skills in epidemiology, biostatistics, and qualitative science.
Dr. Jennings Mayo-Wilson’s research focuses on improving sexual and reproductive health (SRH), including HIV prevention, in vulnerable adolescents and young adults in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, she is interested in: (i) design and evaluation of economic-strengthening interventions to reduce inequities in HIV/SRH, including microenterprise, cash transfers, savings, and financial incentives; (ii) analysis of economic and structural causes of disparities in HIV/SRH, and (iii) use of mobile health technologies to improve implementation and evaluation of HIV/SRH interventions. Her research also examines socio-economic influences on maternal health care-seeking and uptake of assisted reproductive technologies.

Kristen Lindquist
2023-03-03 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On March 3, 2023, Kristen Lindquist will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 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.

Joel Gittelsohn: Environmental interventions to improve healthy food access and prevent obesity in Baltimore: Moving beyond corner stores
2023-03-10 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On January 27, 2023, Joel Gittelsohn will present “Environmental interventions to improve healthy food access and prevent obesity in Baltimore: Moving beyond corner stores” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Joel Gittelsohn, PhD, MS, is a medical anthropologist and public health nutritionist who develops programs to improve food access and reduce risk for chronic diseases.

Hudson Santos
2023-03-24 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On March 24, 2023, Hudson Santos will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Hudson Santos is Professor and the Dolores J. Chambreau Endowed Chair in Nursing at the University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Studies (SONHS). Born in Brazil, Dr. Santos immigrated to the US to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University School of Nursing (2015) after obtaining a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the State University of Paraiba, and a PhD in Nursing Science from the University of Sao Paulo. As a doctoral student, he spent a year as visiting scholar between the University of British Columbia at Vancouver and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Prior to joining the University of Miami, Dr. Santos was a tenured distinguished associate professor and director of the biobehavioral laboratory at UNC-CH School of Nursing.
Dr. Santos is an internationally renowned nurse researcher and principal investigator of multiple funded studies focused on the mechanisms of social determinants of health (SDOH) and developmental health trajectories for at-risk populations, with a strong emphasis on Latinx communities. Specifically, he explores how SDOH, and adverse life events affect maternal-child health and developmental outcomes among at-risk children. His methodological expertise includes bio-social studies, longitudinal cohorts, and clinical interventions. His work bridges the gap between the biological and social domains in nursing science, addressing the developmental origins of health and disease.

Udry Lecture: Steve Ruggles, “It’s None of Their Damn Business”: Privacy and Disclosure Control in the U.S. Census, 1790-2022
2023-03-30 15:00 - 16:30 | Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library, 200 South Road, Chapel Hill, NC, 27515, United States
The 2023 J. Richard Udry Distinguished Lecture will be presented by Steven Ruggles, the Regents Professor of History and Director of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.
Title: “It’s None of Their Damn Business”: Privacy and Disclosure Control in the U.S. Census, 1790-2022
Abstract:
The U.S. Census Bureau is implementing new methods of disclosure control that will reduce the usability of publicly accessible population data. To understand the rationale for the cutbacks in access to data, we must grapple with the history of privacy concerns surrounding the census and the government’s response to those concerns. This paper traces the history of privacy and disclosure control since the first U.S. census in 1790. We argue that controlling public access to census information has never been an effective response to public concerns about government intrusion. We conclude that the Census Bureau should weigh the costs of curtailing access to reliable data against realistic measures of the benefit of new approaches to disclosure control.

Biography from PAA: “Steve is best known as the creator of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), the world’s largest population database, spanning two centuries and 100 countries. Steve’s lifelong addiction to data began early. By age eight, he was coding data for a penny a case for his parents, economists Richard and Nancy Ruggles. Leaving home brought no escape; as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Steve became interested in historical demography and joined the Center for Demography and Ecology. Steve went on to graduate school in history at the University of Pennsylvania, where Sam Preston showed up bearing the brand-new 1900 Public Use Sample that became the centerpiece of Steve’s dissertation (as well as of his moving article, “Confessions of a Micro-Simulator”). After receiving his Ph.D.in 1984, Steve returned to Wisconsin as a postdoc. While at Penn and Wisconsin, Steve observed planning and production for two major historical census projects directed by Preston and Hal Winsborough. This exposure to like-minded data enthusiasts sealed his scholarly fate.
When Steve arrived at the University of Minnesota, he partnered with Russell Menard to obtain funding from NIH and NSF to create samples of the 1850 and 1880 censuses. By 1991, public use microdata files existed for eight U.S. census years between 1880 and 1980, potentially allowing consistent analysis of long-run demographic change. Steve was awarded a grant to make a compatible version of all these datasets and the IPUMS was born. To make IPUMS possible, Steve designed several significant innovations, including the first metadata-based data integration system (1991) and the first interactive website for large scale data dissemination (1995).
In 1999, when the U.S. census series was nearly complete, Steve and his colleagues expanded IPUMS beyond U.S. census data to include international microdata and data from the Current Population Survey. IPUMS data integration technology underlies other large-scale projects, including the Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) and the Integrated Demographic and Health Series (IDHS). In 2001, Steve and John Adams received an NSF grant to create the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS), a comprehensive source for aggregate statistical data and geographic data describing spatial characteristics of the U.S. population from 1790 to the present. Steve and collaborators are now working on Terra Populus, which integrates global data on population and the environment over the past two centuries. The newest project is “Big Microdata,” which aims to develop complete microdata for all U.S. censuses between 1790 and 1940, covering 700 million persons. He is also working with the Census Bureau to convert Census Bureau internal microdata to IPUMS format and to link the historical census data to modern censuses, surveys, and administrative records.
Steve’s contributions to demography are not solely the data infrastructure that underlies so much scholarship in our field. His own research focuses on historical family demography, especially on long-run changes in intergenerational co-residence, single parenthood, divorce, and marriage. In a book and more than 30 articles, he has analyzed the impact of demographic and economic change on family composition, marriage, and divorce. He has consistently taken positions at odds with the conventional wisdom. For example, Steve argued that Early Modern England did not have a nuclear family system, that family reconstitutions studies are systematically biased by migration censoring, and that divorce risk in the U.S. has risen substantially since 1980. Departing from cultural interpretations of family change, Steve argues that families in developed countries were transformed by industrialization and the rise of wage labor, first among men and then among women.
Steve is also the founding Director of the Minnesota Population Center. The Center was established in 2000 with 20 members and a small grant from the University of Minnesota. Shortly thereafter, Steve submitted a successful proposal for a R24 center grant from NICHD. MPC has grown to serve 95 population researchers from 10 colleges and 26 departments at the University of Minnesota—and more than 70,000 researchers worldwide who use MPC data.
Steve has been recognized for his service to the field and his academic accomplishments by American Sociological Association, Social Science History Association, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, and the PAA. Steve was honored to serve as the President of the PAA in 2015.”

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.

Julia Behrman: Family Size Ideals in Flux? Change and Variation in the United States
2023-04-28 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
On April 28, 2023, Julia Behrman (Northwestern) will present “Family Size Ideals in Flux? Change and Variation in the United States” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2022-2023 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Julia Behrman’s research investigates the causes and consequences of family change in a global perspective. Her research explores how the institution of the family shapes and is shaped by key social phenomenon in four main areas: (i) educational expansion; (ii) environmental change, natural disaster and climate shocks; (iii) expansion of women’s labor force participation; and (iv) migration. Much of her work is motivated by questions of power: who has power within families and how is it manifested? What events or experiences lead to changes in power dynamics within families? Do changes in family structures alleviate or perpetuate disadvantage between and within families?
Behrman’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation and South African Medical Research Council and her work has received awards from American Sociological Association Sections on Education, Population, and Development; the Society for the Study of Social Problems; the Population Association of America; and the Sociologist AIDS Network. Prior to starting at Northwestern, she was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She received her PhD from New York University in 2017.

Désiré Kédagni
2023-09-08 12:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Faculty Fellow Désiré Kédagni will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Kedagni’s interests span a broad range of topics with an important focus on microeconometrics (identification issues: theory and applications), causal inference, policy evaluation, and development economics. A distinctive feature of his recent econometric work is that it is motivated and tailored to answer specific real-world empirical questions. He has been collaborating with non-econometricians in order to make use of the newly-developed econometric methods to help answer their relevant research questions. His main applications are in the fields of labor economics and economics of education. His recent research has been published in Biometrika, Journal of Econometrics, The Econometrics Journal, Journal of Applied Econometrics and European Economic Review.

Demography Daze
2023-09-15 13:00 - 17:30 | Gross Hall, Duke University, 140 Science Dr, Durham, NC, 27708, United States
9th Annual Demography Daze
Duke University Population Research Institute and Carolina Population Center
September 15, 2023 1pm to 5:15pm Duke University Gross Hall, Rm 270
(Outdoors reception following on Gross Hall Porch)
Conference Moderators: Giovanna Merli (DUPRI) and Karen Guzzo (CPC)
1:00-2:30: General Session I. Inequality and Health (15 min presentations)
Tyson Brown (Duke), On Measuring Structural Racism and its Effects on Population Health
Todd Jensen (UNC), Add Health Parent Study: Advancing Multigenerational Research on Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Health
Carolyn Halpern (UNC), Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity & Socioeconomic Status in Add Health
Hermann Pontzer (Duke), The Impact of Economic Development on Physical Activity, Energy Requirements, and Metabolic Health
2:40-3:35: Flash Talk Session (5 min presentations)
Marcos Rangel (Duke), In the Eye of the Beholder: Social Networks and Educational Attainment
Allison Frost (UNC), Does Parenting Mediate the Association Between Maternal Depression and Child Development? A Longitudinal Study in Pakistan
Christina Gibson-Davis (Duke), Lisa Keister (Duke), Lisa Gennetian (Duke), Shuyi Qiu (Duke), Net Worth Poverty and Educational Attainment in Young Adulthood
Sung-mok Jung (UNC), Findings from the US Scenario COVID Modeling Hub
Scott Lynch (Duke), Years of Life Lost by Those Who Died From COVID: The Human Cost of Variation in State Policies Across the Pandemic
Mohanraj Krishnan (UNC), Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) and Severe Obesity
Eric A. Bai (Duke), Madeleine Beckner (Duke), Botao Ju (Duke), Jerry P. Reiter (Duke), Ted Mouw (UNC), M. Giovanna Merli (Duke), Bayesian Record Linkage with Application to Chinese Immigrants in Raleigh-Durham (ChIRDU) Study
4:45-5:15: General Session II: Population Dynamics and Policy (15 min presentations)
Carmen Gutierrez (UNC), The ACA and the Demography of The Criminal Justice Population
Martin Edelmann (Duke), Chris Wildeman (Duke), and Garret Baker (Duke), Four Worlds of Child Maltreatment and Foster Care Placement
Lisa Gennetian (Duke), Unconditional Cash to US Families with Children: Evidence From a Longitudinal Randomized Control Study
Barry Popkin (UNC), The Global Food Research Program’s Global Work: Creating a Toolkit of Policies That Work

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.

Youngmin (Min) Yi: Racial Inequality in the Prevalence, Intensity, and Permeation of Incarceration in Family Life
2023-10-06 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Youngmin Yi will present “Racial Inequality in the Prevalence, Intensity, and Permeation of Incarceration in Family Life” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Yi is a sociologist and social demographer who studies the intersection of family life with the criminal justice, child welfare, and immigration systems in the United States. She is especially interested in two broad issues: (1) these institutional intersections as sites of (re)production and moderation of social disparities in wellbeing and (2) the role that these policy institutions play in shaping and racializing our definitions and experiences of family and familial relationships and the life stages of childhood and the transition to adulthood.
Her current research projects use a combination of administrative and survey data to explore the unequal distribution of child welfare and criminal legal system involvement across social groups and space as well as the relationship between this unequal distribution of policy system contact and disparities in health. She has published her work in peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Marriage and Family, Population and Development Review, and Social Forces.

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.

A Small Sample of Ongoing Add Health Research
2023-10-27 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Moderated by Kathleen Mullan Harris. Speakers will include:
Jessica Su: “Structural Sexism and Early Childbearing”
Lauren Gaydosh: “Biomarkers of Health & Emerging Risk in Established Adulthood”
Taylor Hargrove: “Structural Racism & AD/ADRD Risk among Early Midlife Adults”
Reed DeAngelis: “Historical Redlining and Life Course Disparities in Add Health”

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.

Sarah Hayford, Childbearing careers and women’s mid-life well-being: Preliminary evidence from a cohort study in rural Mozambique.
2023-11-10 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Sarah Hayford will present Childbearing careers and women’s mid-life well-being: Preliminary evidence from a cohort study in rural Mozambique. as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Sarah Hayford studies family formation and reproductive health, primarily in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. She is interested in how people make plans about these behaviors and who is able to carry out these plans. Recent and current research topics include the determinants of unintended childbearing in the United States and policy impacts on reproductive health access and outcomes in Ohio. Hayford is working with a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team to collect survey data on the effects of parental migration on children’s socioemotional development, educational outcomes, and family formation behaviors in Mexico, Mozambique, and Nepal. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, private foundations, and seed grants from OSU’s Department of Sociology.

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.

Kavita Shah Arora: Equitable postpartum permanent contraception
2024-01-12 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Kavita Shah Arora will present “Equitable postpartum permanent contraception” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Kavita Shah Arora is an Associate Professor with Tenure in the Division Director for General Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Her clinical, research, and education interests center around reproductive justice and ensuring evidence-based and equitable reproductive health policy, with a focus on sterilization disparities. She has authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications and has been funded by the NIH, HRSA, Greenwall Foundation, and Society for Family Planning. She currently serves as the Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics for the National Academy of Medicine and Chair of the national ethics committee of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She has served on the national ethics committee of the American Medical Association, on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities, and on the Governing Council for the Young Physicians Section of the American Medical Association. She was named a 40 under 40 leader in minority health by the National Minority Quality Forum.
Dr. Arora received her BS with a minor in Philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University. In 2009, she graduated with both an MD from Jefferson Medical College and a Master’s Degree in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University. She subsequently completed a Master’s in Science of Clinical Research at Case Western Reserve University.

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.”

Ken Bollen: Causal inference with random assignment vs. researcher created binary treatments
2024-01-26 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Ken Bollen will present “Causal inference with random assignment vs. researcher created binary treatments” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Ken Bollen develops new quantitative methods to apply to the population and social/behavioral sciences. These include new models to analyze longitudinal data, creative approaches to analyzing difficult-to-measure concepts, and developing estimators that have greater robustness to the approximate nature of our models. He also is working on comparing and integrating different approaches to causal inference. Population studies, health, and trauma are the contexts within which he develops these methods while also addressing practical substantive questions.
Ken Bollen’s research focuses on creating new statistical tools that have applications across a wide range of population areas. Many of these tools are developed within the field of latent variable structural equation models (SEMs). SEMs formulate systems of equations, allow multiple “dependent” variables with mediation effects, and take account of the measurement error commonly found in population-related variables. Collaborating with a number of CPC fellows, postdocs, and graduate trainees, Bollen has applied SEMs to topics such as evaluating the use of birth weight, gestational age, and birth length as measures of a mother’s fetal conditions, assessing the measurement properties of self-rated health and depression measures, evaluating the quality of physiological measures from surveys, and analyzing the effects of SES on fertility. Many of these projects have utilized CPC-based data such as those from Add Health and the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey.

Natalicio Serrano: Equitable and sustainable opportunities for active living: exploring the impacts of neighborhood development and zoning strategies
2024-02-02 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Natalicio Serrano will present “Equitable and sustainable opportunities for active living: exploring the impacts of neighborhood development and zoning strategies” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Natalicio (Nat) Serrano is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. His research focuses on creating equitable and sustainable environment and policy strategies for physical activity promotion and chronic disease prevention. Dr. Serrano utilizes a systems approach to understand inter-related factors and sectors (e.g., Transportation, Planning, Housing) impacting or being impacted by environment and policy strategies for physical activity. He is particularly interested in understanding and addressing issues related to neighborhood development, racial and economic segregation, gentrification, and displacement. Prior to joining UNC, Dr. Serrano was a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Illinois Chicago’s Institute for Health Research and Policy.
