Carolina Population Center

Activity Spaces and Youth Development: Preliminary Findings from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context Study
2017-10-06 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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