Molly Rosenberg: Cash transfers to promote healthy aging in low-income settings: Triangulating evidence from rural South Africa
2023-09-22 12:00 (America/New_York) | 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.

Lauren Valentino: Racial Wealth Gaps in the US: Realities, Misperceptions, and Interventions to Increase Public Support for Wealth-Equalizing Policies and Behavior
2024-02-09 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Lauren Valentino will present “Racial Wealth Gaps in the US: Realities, Misperceptions, and Interventions to Increase Public Support for Wealth-Equalizing Policies and Behavior” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
“I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Ohio State University (2020-2023) and a postdoctoral associate at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University (2019-2020). I earned my PhD in Sociology from Duke University in 2019.
My research focuses on culture & cognition and inequality & stratification. Specifically, I use a cognitive approach to culture in order to understand how people form diverse beliefs and perceptions about important stratifying institutions in society — like discrimination, occupations, social movements, and schools and universities — to show how these beliefs and perceptions in turn shape inequality. My work employs a wide variety of methodological approaches, including survey-experiments, interviews, and analysis of secondary survey and administrative data.
My work has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Poetics, and Social Problems, among other outlets. Findings from these studies have been covered in U.S. News & World Report, Inside Higher Ed, and The Hechinger Report. This research has been generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity, Ohio State’s Department of Sociology Seed Grant fund, OSU’s Institute for Population Research which includes core support from the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Duke’s Interdisciplinary Institute for Education and Human Development, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Bass Connections, and the Worldviews Lab.”

Ganga Bey:Characterizing Pathways from Social Stressors to Cognitive Health Disparities: Theory and Emerging Evidence
2024-02-16 12:00 - 13:00 | Carolina Square Room 2002, 123 W. Franklin St, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516
Ganga Bey will present “Characterizing Pathways from Social Stressors to Cognitive Health Disparities: Theory and Emerging Evidence” as part of the Carolina Population Center’s 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Research Seminar Series.
Ganga Bey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology within the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She studies how people’s beliefs about identity, worth, and ability affect their stress, aging, and susceptibility to disease.

Biosocial Symposium: Colter Mitchell - The Potential and Peril of Social Epigenetics
2024-02-23 12:00 - 13:00 | 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.
