Carolina Population Center

Biosocial Symposium: Colter Mitchell - The Potential and Peril of Social Epigenetics
2024-02-23 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York) | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Colter Mitchell will present “The Potential and Peril of Social Epigenetics”
as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Dr. Mitchell is interested in the influence of the social and familial environmental on health and behavior over the life course. His earlier research focused mainly on the social environment and child and young adult behavior in early life. Over the last decade, he has expanded on this research by examining how social contextual factors interact with genetic, epigenetic, and neurodevelopment factors to predict health and wellbeing over the life course, including in later life.

Jaime Slaughter-Acey
2024-03-01 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Jaime Slaughter-Acey will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Jaime Slaughter-Acey is an Associate Professor with training and expertise in social epidemiology and maternal and child health epidemiology. Her research focuses on socio-environmental, and psychosocial factors that contribute to health across the life course, with emphasis on women and families from marginalized and/or underserved populations and health equity.

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

Kerilyn Schewel: Rethinking the Links between Climate Change, Development, and Human Mobility: Insights from Rural Ethiopia
2024-04-05 12:00 - 13:00
Kerilyn Schewel will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Schewel is the co-director of the Duke Program on Climate-Related Migration, a Lecturing Fellow at the Duke Center for International Development and a Senior Researcher at the International Migration Institute.
Trained as a sociologist, her research to examines the root causes of human migration and immobility, with an emphasis on the themes of gender, youth, education, rural development, and climate change. She has carried out extensive qualitative and mixed-methods fieldwork in Ethiopia. Her book, Moved by Modernity: How Development Shapes Migration in Rural Ethiopia, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
At the Duke Center for International Development, Kerilyn teaches on migration policy and development and leads Rural Development and the Capability to Stay, a research project funded by the Social Science Research Council. She has also worked with the United States Agency for International Development, International Labour Organization, International Organization for Migration, and the Joint Research Center of the European Commission on policy-oriented publications and dialogue.
Kerilyn holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam (2019), an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford (2014), and a BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia (2009). She has held visiting researcher positions at the University of Addis Ababa and Princeton University.

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

2024 Add Health Users Conference
2024-06-17 - 2024-06-18 | Rizzo Center, 150 DuBose Home Ln, Chapel Hill, NC, 27517, United States
Save the date! The 2024 Add Health Users Conference will take place on Monday, June 17, 2024, and Tuesday, June 18, 2024, at the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. More information will be provided later this fall, along with a Call for Papers available on November 1, 2023. Visit the 2024 Add Health Users Conference website for additional details.

Lauren Gaydosh: Biological and Cognitive Aging Among Sexual and Gender Minority Older Adults
2024-08-23 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Lauren Gaydosh will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Gaydosh’s primary research focuses on better understanding the role of early life environments in shaping health across the life course. This work integrates social, contextual, and biological data from population-based longitudinal studies to examine how inequalities in the social environment get under the skin to create health disparities. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the US Fulbright Program. Dr. Gaydosh received her PhD in Sociology, Demography, and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2015.

Demography Daze
2024-09-06 13:00 - 17:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
The annual Demography Daze event is a collaboration between UNC’s Carolina Population Center and Duke University’s Population Research Institute.
Program and schedule

Elizabeth Frankenberg: Using High Resolution Imagery and Neural Networks to Measure Construction and Reconstruction after a Disaster
2024-09-13 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Elizabeth Frankenberg will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Frankenberg’s research focuses on individual and family response to change across the life course and the role of community, broadly construed, in individual behaviors and outcomes. In addition to these substantive interests, two cross-cutting themes are inherent in her research: health status as a critical dimension of well-being and the close integration of methods and data. She has invested heavily in developing and implementing innovative and ambitious designs for data collection to support her own research and that of the scientific and policy communities more broadly. These investments center on three projects: the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR), the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), and the Worker Iron Status Evaluation (WISE). The STAR project, which assesses the social, economic, demographic, and health impacts of the December 26, 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia, has been hailed as the strongest large-scale study ever done to measure population-level response to a disaster over a long period of time.

Yuan Zhang: Co-Calibration of Cognitive Performance of the National Health and Aging Trends Study with Health and Retirement Study’s Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol: Implications for Dementia Classification
2024-09-20 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Yuan Zhang will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Yuan Zhang’s research examines how social factors across different life stages influence aging-related outcomes, with an emphasis on populations in less economically developed countries. She also studies population health trends to uncover how disease burden, dementia, and mortality are unfolding in the population, and how they are linked to other structural changes such as increasing education.

Tanya Garcia: The Missing Link: Establishing the Parallels Between Censored Covariate and Missing Data
2024-09-27 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Tanya Garcia will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.

Her research innovates new statistical methods that solve important neuroscience and biomedical problems and advances the underlying theory of those methods. Her work has contributed to four exciting areas: prediction models, model selection for high-dimensional data, regression models with measurement error, mean-covariance modeling for longitudinal data.

Malissa Alinor: Just a Diversity Hire?: The Impact of Competency Microaggressions on Workplace Outcomes
2024-10-04 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Malissa Alinor will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Dr. Malissa Alinor is a sociologist whose research focuses on how women and people of color experience discrimination, the emotional and behavioral consequences of experiencing discrimination, and how organizational policies shape racial and gender inequality. She is a mixed methodologist with expertise in experimental, qualitative, and quantitative methods.
Dr. Alinor is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership and Innovation Lab in affiliation with the Stanford Impact Labs- using social science research for the social good. She earned a Ph.D and M.A. in sociology from the University of Georgia and a B.A., summa cum laude, in sociology from the University of Florida.

Guang Guo
2024-10-25 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Guang Guo will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Guang Guo has focused on the intersection of sociology and genomics, incorporating advances in genomics and epigenomics in the studies of social science issues such as social stratification and health inequality. His work takes advantage of dazzling developments in molecular genomics over the past quarter century have undermined an assumption still common in mainstream social sciences — that individuals are about the same at birth (a “blank slate”) and that the observed differences across individuals are due entirely to environmental influences.

Maggie Sugg
2024-11-01 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Maggie Sugg will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: The Impact of the Climate Crisis on Critical Life Periods: A closer look at Maternal and Adolescent Mental Health

Jennifer Barber
2024-11-08 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Jennifer Barber will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: Gatekeeping, Conflict, Obligation, and Agency: How Intimate Contexts Structure Penile-Vaginal Decision-Making among Young Women

Ashu Handa
2024-11-15 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Ashu Handa will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: The long-term impacts of the Malawi Social Cash Transfer Program on households and adolescents
Dr. Handa is an economist working on poverty, health and human development in sub-Saharan Africa. He is co-PI of The Transfer Project, a regional initiative with UNICEF and FAO to understand the broad effects of government sponsored cash transfer programs in sub-Saharan Africa. See the project website for further information on the Transfer Project. He is currently studying the long-term effects of cash transfers in Zambia and Malawi.

Chuck Huber
2024-11-22 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Chuck Huber will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: Causal Inference for Complex Observational Data
Huber is the Director of Statistical Outreach at StataCorp and is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Biostatistics at New York University.

Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series: Pam Herd
2025-01-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Pam Herd will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: How Administrative Burden Impacts Health
Pam Herd is the Carol Kakalec Kohn Professor of Social Policy and faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on inequality and how it intersects with health, aging, and policy.

Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series: Fernando Colchero
2025-01-24 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Fernando Colchero will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: Comparative Biodemography of Aging Across the Tree of Life
Fernando Colchero is a statistical and mathematical ecologist and the leader of the Statistical Demography Group. His work focuses on developing and applying methods for demography and population dynamics.

Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series: Jack DeWaard
2025-02-07 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Jack DeWaard will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: Migration as a Vector of the Contemporary Legacy of Slavery: Evidence from One Century of U.S. Censuses
Jack DeWaard, Research Collaborator, Population Council & External Affiliate, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington

Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series: Justin Sola
2025-02-14 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Justin Sola will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: For Whom Does the Bell Toll? Emerging Approaches to Heterogeneity
Justin Sola is an assistant professor with a joint appointments in the UNC Department of Sociology and the UNC School of Data Science and Society.

Interdisciplinary Research Series: Alexander Sahn
2025-02-21 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Alexander Sahn will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: TBD

Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series: Biosocial Symposium with Nathaniel Glasser
2025-02-28 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Nathaniel Glasser will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series Biosocial Symposium.
Topic: Why are there half as many male patients in the primary care clinic?

Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series: Stephanie Koning
2025-03-21 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Stephanie Koning will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: Understanding Life-Course Mechanisms Underlying Social Inequities in Reproductive and Family Health
Stephanie Koning is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her work focuses on biopsychosocial determinants of maternal and child health, structural violence and social stress and the health implications of migration and displacement.

A reading of "The Turnaway Play," based on the work of Dr. Diana Greene Foster
2025-03-26 16:30 - 19:00 | Michael Hooker Research Center Auditorium, Gillings School of Global Public Health, 135 Dauer Drive, Chapel Hill, NC, 27514, United States
Reception: 4:30-5:30 p.m.
Reading: 5:30 p.m.-7
“The Turnaway Play” is based on abortion research pioneered by Dr. Diana Greene Foster and written by Lesley Lisa Greene.
The play is inspired by the Turnaway Study, conducted by Dr. Diana Greene Foster, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Foster followed 1,000 women from for five years and obtained the first scientific results on the consequences people face when having or being denied an abortion. The play uses the experiences of these people to bust myths and reduce abortion stigma.
For more information, contact reprojustice@unc.edu

J. Richard Udry Distinguished Lecture: Diana Greene Foster
2025-03-27 15:30 - 17:00 | Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library, 200 South Road, Chapel Hill, NC, 27515, United States
Dr. Diana Greene Foster
Diana Greene Foster will present the 2025 J. Richard Udry Distinguished Lecture.
Topic: Health and Social Consequences of Ending Federal Protections for Abortion in the United States: Lessons from the Turnaway Study
Dr. Foster is a Demographer and Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH). She uses quantitative models and analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of family planning policies and the effect of unintended pregnancy on women’s lives. She led the Turnaway Study, a longitudinal prospective study of almost 1,000 women who received or were denied wanted abortions from 30 facilities across the United States. She also leads a Global Turnaway Study, documenting the experience of women denied abortions in five other countries where it is legal: Bangladesh, Colombia, Nepal, South Africa and Tunisia.

Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series: Maria Gallo
2025-04-04 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Dr. Maria Gallo
Maria Gallo will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: Effects of Attending A Crisis Pregnancy Center
Maria Gallo is the Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her research focuses on the prevention of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and unintended pregnancies, as well as the reduction of risky sexual behaviors.

Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series: Jim Elliot
2025-04-25 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Jim Elliot will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2024-2025 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: The Revolving Door of Risk: Climate Hazards, Risk Containment, and the Hidden Social Dynamics of Managed Retreat
Jim Elliot is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Rice University. His research focuses on the social production of inequalities and environmental hazards.

18th NIH Matilda White Riley Distinguished Lecture, Presented by Robert Hummer
2025-08-28 14:30 - 16:00
Register for the Webinar
CPC Fellow Robert Hummer will deliver the 18th National Institutes of Health (NIH) Matilda White Riley Distinguished Lecture on August 28.
This presentation will focus on the history, theoretical and substantive motivations, empirical contributions, innovations in recent data collection, and preliminary descriptive findings from Wave VI of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health).
Add Health is one of the most innovative and widely used nationally representative longitudinal studies of Americans ever undertaken. It provides data for thousands of researchers around the world to more fully understand the multilevel (biological, survey, contextual) life course factors that contribute to health and health disparities among U.S. adolescents and adults.
The presentation will describe the origins of Add Health and how it has evolved over 30 years. Significant attention will be given to the recently completed wave (Wave VI) of data collection and the preliminary descriptive insights from this new dataset, which will soon be publicly available. The presentation will conclude with information on how to access Add Health data.
Robert A. Hummer, Ph.D., is the Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology and fellow of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served as the 2021 president of the Population Association of America and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. His research focuses on the accurate documentation and more complete understanding of health and mortality disparities in the United States. He is currently director and principal investigator of the long-running Add Health study.
His teaching interests mirror those of his research. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on population health, health disparities, and the life course. Over his career, he has chaired 36 Ph.D. dissertations to completion and his students have gone on to positions in leading academic and government institutions throughout the United States, Latin America, and Asia.

Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series: Giovanna Merli
2025-09-05 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Giovanna Merli will present as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2025-2026 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Topic: Ghanaian Migrant Health Study: Findings from a Feasibility Study
M. Giovanna Merli is Professor of Public Policy, Sociology and Global Health and Director of the Duke University Population Research Institute. Her work straddles demography, Chinese population, society and Chinese diasporas, migration, global health. Her research interests include population and health issues that intersect frontline public policy; the social and behavioral determinants of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases; the evaluation of network-based methods to recruit population representative samples of hard-to-survey, hidden or rare populations; and the application of network sampling approaches to the study of migration and health.
