Robert Hummer
PhD, Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor, Sociology
rhummer@email.unc.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Google Scholar Profile
PubMed Publications
CPC Publications
ORCID iD
Robert A. Hummer's research program is focused on the accurate description and more complete understanding of population health patterns and trends in the United States. He is currently Director of the long-running National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally-representative longitudinal study of over 20,000 American adults who are now around 40 years old and have been followed since they were adolescents. Dr. Hummer is particularly interested in understanding how and why the physical, mental, and cognitive health of individuals in the Add Health study differs across racial/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic subgroups of the population.
Robert A. Hummer is the Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Faculty Fellow of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. His research program is focused on the accurate description and more complete understanding of population health patterns and trends in the United States. He is currently Director of the long-running National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally-representative longitudinal study of over 20,000 American adults who are now around 40 years old and have been followed since they were adolescents. Dr. Hummer is particularly interested in understanding how and why the physical, mental, and cognitive health of individuals in the Add Health study differs across racial/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic subgroups of the population.
Dr. Hummer has published more than 150 journal articles, book chapters, and books in his areas of interest, with attention to health disparities both during infancy/childhood as well as across the adult life course. He has developed conceptual models to better understand disparities in health/mortality and specializes in the creative and effective use of very large data sets to study US health/mortality patterns and trends. His latest book, Population Health in America (with Erin R. Hamilton, published in 2019 by the University of California Press), weaves together demographic data with social theory to provide an in-depth historical and contemporary portrait of US population health and challenges readers to examine current health policy priorities and to ask whether major shifts are needed.
Hummer's other current work also include projects that accurately document and provide a more complete understanding of racial/ethnic, educational, and gender disparities in U.S. health and mortality. He is Co-PI of an NIA-funded grant (with Jennifer Karas Montez, Sarah Burgard, and Jennifer Ailshire) that is developing a research network to understand how and why the United States is falling behind most other developed/wealthy nations, and even some developing nations, on major indicators of population health. Finally, in collaboration with Allison Aiello and Amanda Thompson, he developed a new training program for both predoctoral and postdoctoral researchers, funded by NICHD and housed in the Carolina Population Center, on the integration of the biological and social sciences for the more holistic understanding of life course processes of health and health disparities in the United States.
Associated Projects
- Add Health (The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health)
- Add Health Wave VI Cognition and Early Risk Factors for Dementia Project
- Early Life Mortality in the United States
- From Biological to Social Processes: Interdisciplinary Training in Life Course Research
- Influences of State Policies and Racialized Parental Incarceration on Youth Justice System Contact and Conflict, Emotional Estrangement and Intergenerational Life Outcomes
- Network on Life Course Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America