Research
Research Interests
I am a demographer, medical sociologist, and social statistician conducting transdisciplinary research on population health and aging to understand how social factors affect health across the human life span. My research aims to reveal complex patterns of social disparities in health, explicate the life course processes shaping these disparities, and test demographic, behavioral, and biological mechanisms underlying health disparities. My active research agenda pushes new boundaries and combines advances in sociological, quantitative psychological, developmental, and biological sciences to advance our understanding of how social exposures and life experiences “get under the skin” to manifest in health differences. I use an integrative life-course exposome approach to:
1) bring demographic and sociological theoretical perspectives to bear on the analyses of diverse forms of big health data (e.g., vital statistics, large-scale surveys, biomarkers, and administrative records);
2) develop new statistical models and methods for integrative analyses of these data across the full life course from birth to old age; and
3) construct a multisystem explanatory framework across levels (cellular, individual, and structural) for investigating life course origins of and changes in social disparities in health.
