Carolina Population Center

18th NIH Matilda White Riley Distinguished Lecture, Presented by Robert Hummer
2025-08-28 14:30 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
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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.
