Research Assistant Professor, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Aging and Policy Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Policy Research
CAPS Biography:
I contribute to the center’s signature theme on health and well-being, with multiple past and ongoing projects across the cross-cutting themes on policy, place, and specific populations. Broadly, my research interests are in population health and health disparities throughout the life course, as well as the measurement and conceptualization of health and aging, drawing on both vital statistics and survey data to understand social patterns and trends in health in the United States and abroad. A defining aspect of my research addresses social determinants of health, using social demographic theories and methods to document how social inequality gives rise to health disparities over the life course. As both a lead author and collaborator, I have published on gender, racial/ethnic, nativity, socioeconomic, and geographic disparities in health throughout the life course, as well as their intersections.
Specifically, my published work documents and describes disparities in mortality across a broad range of outcomes and causes of death, including multiple studies documenting sociodemographic determinants of and age-specific variation in cause-specific mortality in the United States. Further, my recent research specifically examines trends and disparities in COVID-19 mortality as well as the role of U.S. states’ contexts for individuals’ health. I have documented racial/ethnic variation in COVID-19 mortality throughout the pandemic as well as received funding from the Michigan P30 Center on the Demography of Aging to examine the contribution of COVID-19 mortality to U.S. state trends in life expectancy relative to international peer countries. I have also been a co-PI on a pilot project merging states’ sociopolitical contextual data with individual-level longitudinal data throughout the life course to better understand the importance of states’ policy, built, and social environments for morbidity and premature mortality. I am currently working on projects examining the intersection of state policy contexts and county economic contexts for U.S. working-age mortality outcomes over the past four decades, as well as projects comparing life course socioeconomic trajectories and health outcomes in emerging midlife cohorts in the United States and the United Kingdom, with an emphasis on the role of national social safety nets for socioeconomically disadvantaged adults.
