Scholar Profiles

2009 Cohort

Summer Hawkins, PhD

Summer Sherburne Hawkins is an epidemiologist with an interest in addressing policy-relevant research questions in maternal and child health. In 2008, Summer completed her doctoral degree in epidemiology at the Institute of Child Health at University College London; her thesis examined individual-, family-, community-, and area-level risk factors for obesity in three-year-old British children. She has also developed studies examining the determinants of health behaviors during pregnancy, infant feeding practices, and health behaviors in young children. As a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar, Summer intends to continue addressing health disparities in the field of maternal and child health. She plans to investigate the determinants of health behaviors during pregnancy, among parents with young children, and early life. Summer's focus on policy-relevant research has also fueled her interest in how epidemiological methods can be used to assess the impact of policies on health behaviors during pregnancy and early life as well as health disparities. She looks forward to working across disciplines to explore how policy evaluation and epidemiological methods can be combined to address research questions relevant to the fields of epidemiology, public health, and policy. Summer also holds a bachelor's degree in Biopsychology from Vassar College and a master's degree in clinical psychology from Drexel University. 

Jennifer Jennings, PhD

Jennifer Jennings is a sociologist who studies racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in educational and health outcomes. Her dissertation examines how government accountability systems that evaluate schools and hospitals based on client outcomes affect educational and health inequality. By making use of audit measures for which schools and hospitals are not held accountable, she evaluates these systems' effects on a broader set of outcomes, as well as our perceptions of racial, gender, and socio economic inequality. As a Health and Society Scholar, she will expand her existing research to examine 1) the relationship between early health and educational outcomes, 2) within and between-hospitalvariation in cardiac care and its effects on racial disparities, and 3) the effects of community-level shocks on population health. She will receive a Ph.D in Sociology from Columbia University in summer 2009. In 2011, she will join the Sociology department at New York University.

2008 Cohort

Kate McLaughlin, PhD 

Kate is a clinical psychologist with general interests in the relationship between stress, socioeconomic disadvantage, and adolescent psychopathology and in the development of sustainable interventions to prevent the onset of depression and anxiety disorders. She has a joint Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Yale University and completed her clinical internship at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder at the Boston-area Veteran's Administration Health Care System. Her research program focuses on two areas of inquiry. First, she seeks to identify determinants of adolescent psychopathology, specifically of depression and anxiety disorders. In particular, she has examined cognitive and emotion regulation mechanisms linking stress and socioeconomic disadvantage to poor mental health outcomes. Second, she is interested in developing and empirically evaluating interventions designed to prevent the onset of adolescent depression and anxiety disorders. In her dissertation project she developed and evaluated a primary preventive intervention targeting depression and anxiety among economically disadvantaged adolescents. During her time in the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars program, Katie intends to broaden the scope of her research on risk factors to examine social determinants of adolescent psychopathology. She hopes to identify mechanisms linking neighborhood-level characteristics, such as poverty and residential mobility, to individual mental health outcomes. Katie also plans to develop a structural-level preventive intervention for depression and anxiety that targets both individual- and community-level risk factors.

Arijit Nandi, PhD 

Ari is concerned with the impact of macro-level factors on population health. His thesis work focused on understanding how economic processes, particularly deindustrialization, influence neighborhood environments and patterns of drug use. In other research, he has explored the social epidemiology of common mood-anxiety disorders and substance use disorders and outcomes. Other research areas of interest include migration and obesity. While in the program, Arijit will be continuing this work, while also exploring the association between political policies and population health and addressing challenges to causal inference in social epidemiology. Arijit received a PhD from the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
 

Elizabeth Sweet, PhD 

Elizabeth is a biocultural anthropologist researching cultural and developmental aspects of racial health disparities. She uses novel applications of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in her work to operationalize the everyday social contexts of disease. In her dissertation research with African American youth in Chicago, she utilized ethnographic data and health biomarkers to explore how culturally salient experiences of stress and social position become embodied in adolescent cardiovascular risk. She is currently conducting a pilot project exploring pregnancy-related stressors for urban, low income African American women, and plans to investigate how these stressors are associated with gestational outcomes and maternal and infant health. While in the Health and Society Scholars program, Elizabeth will continue to develop innovative applications of mixed-methods biocultural approaches. She will focus on political economic dimensions of health disparities and how material consumption and status influence patterns of income inequality and health. She will receive both a Ph.D. in Anthropology and a Master of Public Health degree from Northwestern University in the spring of 2008.

2007 Cohort

Jason Block, MD, MPH 
Jason Block is a general internal medicine physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital, having recently completed the Brigham and Women's primary care internal medicine residency followed by a year as chief resident. He received his medical degree from Tulane University School of Medicine and his masters in public health in epidemiology from Tulane University School of Public Health. His research has explored the obesity epidemic in poor communities, focusing specifically on physicians' knowledge and attitudes regarding obesity and the availability of fast food in poor and minority neighborhoods. Through the Health and Society Scholars program, he will investigate how food availability in poor neighborhoods can directly impact disparities in chronic disease and assess ecological-level interventions to address such disparities. Prior to medical school, he worked at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in Washington, D.C., working on health care quality.

Mahason Mujahid, PhD 
Mahasin Mujahid, received her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from The University of Michigan in January 2007. She also holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Xavier University, New Orleans LA and a M.S. in Biostatistics from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examined the relationship between residential environments and cardiovascular disease risk factors and outcomes as well as the contribution of neighborhood environments to racial/ethnic disparities in cardiovascular health. This work allowed her to apply innovative techniques for addressing various methodological issues involved in the development, measurement, and validation of neighborhood and ecologic measures. Her general research interests include: 1) racial/ethnic disparities in chronic disease, 2) methodological and theoretical issues related to the study of the upstream determinants of health, and 3) the design and implementation of interventions that target marginalized populations to improve access to health enriching opportunity structures.

Margaret A. Sheridan, PhD 
Margaret Sheridan received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 prior to receiving her degree she completed a clinical internship at NYU Child Study Center/Bellevue Hospital. She has a general interest in the effect of the social environment on brain development. Her graduate research focused on the neural correlates of working memory and inhibition in adolescents with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). While at Berkeley she also examined the neural correlates of learning and inhibition in children from low and high socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds using fMRI. As a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar Margaret plans to continue a cross-disciplinary investigation into the effect of environmental variables associated with SES on neural development. She will particularly focus on the role that SES-associated stress plays in neural development with a view towards understanding how changes in neurobiology may mediate the relationship between social variables and health outcomes.

2006 Cohort

Kristi Pullen, PhD 
Kristi Pullen received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in May of 2006. Her thesis focused on the structural and functional characterization of PstP, the single Serine/Threonine phosphatase in M. tuberculosis. This class of protein is thought to be involved in the cellular response to environmental stress, and Pullen used x-ray cry allography and additional biochemical techniques to further the understanding of the roles metals play in the fold and function of this phosphatase. As a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar, Pullen is working at the interface of the biological and social epidemiologic disciplines. Her aim is to implement the use of quantitative biological assays as a way to reveal possible molecular mechanisms by which social factors affect the health of populations.

Matt Wray, PhD 
Matt Wray is a sociologist with a general interest in understanding how social and health inequalities result from processes of social solidarity and differentiation. He has specialized in understanding how these processes differ between minority and majority groups. Wray, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and is co-editor of White Trash: Race and Class in America, Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, and The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness and author of Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. As a Health and Society Scholar, Wray is examining the racial and spatial heterogeneity of suicide rates in the American West, with a particular emphasis on Las Vegas, the city with the highest metropolitan suicide rate in the U.S. Wray treats suicide rates as important measures of population health, because they reflect dimensions of health missed by narrow biomedical models: namely, the social and cultural health of groups and communities. Especially in times and places of rapid social transformation, the study of suicide can expose hidden health and mortality effects of social isolation and dislocation. In addition to exploring racial and spatial disparities, the research will focus on two major questions with important implications for population health: What lies behind high rates of suicide and how is public indifference to suicide produced?

Kathleen Ziol-Guest, PhD
Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest received her Ph.D. in public policy from The University of Chicago in 2005. Her dissertation research focused on an important policy question; namely, the influence of welfare reform policies pertaining to child support enforcement on child support receipt among divorced custodial parents, as well as the role child support plays in the economic well-being of custodial and non-custodial parents. Among the outcomes examined, along with traditional economic outcomes such as income and poverty status, were material hardship and food insufficiency. Findings indicate the important role of child support in improving the level of food sufficiency for children. Ziol-Guest has also published papers examining household expenditure patterns across family structure, and the health and education consequences for children of parental job loss using several nationally representative datasets. Recently she has begun a program of research examining the factors associated with Food Stamp Program and WIC participation and the role these programs have in impacting health of participants.

2005 Cohort

Jeffrey Bingenheimer, PhD
Jeffrey Bingenheimer is a social epidemiologist whose interests include mathematical representations of the spread of infectious diseases through human populations as well as microeconomic and behavioral ecological approaches to understanding human social behavior. He holds an MPH from the University of Michigan, and is in the process of completing his doctoral dissertation. The latter deals with the growing disparity between black and white Americans in rates of HIV infection, AIDS, and AIDS-related mortality, and argues that background rates of mortality from competing risks may condition individual and collective responses to the spread of disease, thereby perpetuating and exacerbating inequalities. He has worked extensively with data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. As a Health & Society Scholar he continued his empirical research on heterogeneity in the spread of HIV, and to work on the development and analysis of formal theoretical model that places health inequality within the broader context of a dynamic, intergenerational process of social stratification. Bingenheimer is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Penn State University.

Duana Fullwiley, PhD
Duana Fullwiley, an anthropologist of science and medicine, received her Ph.D from UC Berkeley in December of 2002. She is currently completing a book, with the working title "The Enculturated Gene: Making Sense of Sickle cell Difference in Modern Africa," on how cultural practices of ensuring health actively inform genetic renderings of sickle cell anemia in contemporary Senegal. Her work on sickle cell has been funded by the NSF, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the USIA Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council and the National Academies of Science. As of January 2003, Fullwiley has embarked on new research in the United States on recent trends in American genome sciences that aim to tailor pharmaceuticals to individual genetic profiles (pharmacogenomics). As a Robert Wood Johnson scholar she will continue fieldwork in U.S. genomics laboratories, and other related sites, on how rationales of "tailored medicine" have created new grounds for genetic uses and understandings of race. Fullwiley has been an invited scholar at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole des Mines de Paris in France, has held a postdoctoral research position at New York University, and has also been a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Upon completing her RWJ tenure at Harvard, she joined the departments of Anthropology and African and African-American studies at Harvard University as an Assistant Professor.

Kate Strully, PhD
Kate Strully received her Ph.D. in sociology from New York University in 2005. Her research seeks to understand the causal pathways responsible for economic disparities in health, particularly how health influences-and is influenced by-social position. Additionally, her research seeks to understand how social programs and policies (ranging from Medicaid to TANF to special education) mediate relationships between socioeconomic status and health. In this vein, her dissertation is concerned with the relationship between job loss, unemployment, and health. The project works to understand the health consequences of job disruptions, whether these consequences vary depending on macroeconomic forces, and whether income transfer programs (primarily unemployment insurance) reduce the health consequences of job loss and unemployment. At the conclusion of her tenure as an RWJ Health and Society Scholar, she joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Albany, SUNY, as an assistant professor.