PhD, MS
Professor
Faculty Fellow, Carolina Population Center
UNC-Chapel Hill
Cancer Epidemiology
Area of Interest
I am a biodemographer, medical sociologist, and social statistician interested in health, aging and quantitative methodology. The overarching goal of my work is to reveal mechanisms underlying social disparities in health and their changes over the life course. Specifically, my research aims to explicate the process by which social forces and biological factors jointly contribute to health disparities, to uncover how it is that exposures and experiences “get under the skin” to manifest in health differences. I have also published extensively on new statistical methodologies of cohort analysis in the context of demography, cancer epidemiology, and life course sociology. My NIH-funded projects as well as those supported by the LCCC University Cancer Research Funds and Cancer Disparities Development Award used a consortium of population-based data on vital statistics, household surveys, and biomarkers to identifying mechanisms at the most precise level of pathogenesis jointly affected by social and biological processes.
Awards and Honors
- Early Achievement Award, Population Association of America, 2014
- Elected member of the Sociological Research Association, 2013
- Ruth & Philip Hettleman Prize for Artistic & Scientific achievement, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2012
