After receiving a record number of highly qualified applicants, three finalists have been selected and will be joining us this coming fall as members of the 2020-2022 cohort of postdoctoral fellows at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. We look forward to having these scholars join us!
Our incoming David E. Bell Fellow, Madeleine Daepp, is currently completing her doctorate in the department of urban studies and planning at MIT. Her PhD research spans public health and demography, with papers on post-disaster residential mobility, neighborhood attainment, and the effect of healthcare reform on housing prices. She also is a Research Fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where she uses consumer credit data to examine changes in the relationships between migration and mobility, and neighborhood poverty exposures over time.
As a Bell Fellow, she will create a research agenda that better understands the experiences of people displaced after disasters, and will seek to address key questions on the role of social capital in resilience.
Our incoming Sloan Fellow on Aging and Work is Leah Abrams. Leah is completing her PhD in health services organization & policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Her dissertation is examining the depressive symptoms in the aging population, motivated by concern about rising suicide, drug-use, and despair in midlife.
As a Sloan Fellow, Leah will explore how policies that push for later retirement (e.g. changing SS’s full retirement age), are leaving behind certain groups of older adults who lack agency in their retirement timing. She will also examine how public and employer policies can extend working life for this population, rather than punish them for exiting the labor force early.
We’re pleased to host and support incoming Yerby Fellow Adedotun Ogunbajo, who is completing his PhD in behavioral & social health sciences at Brown University School of Public Health. Ade’s dissertation investigates the interactions between minority stress, mental health problems, substance abuse, and HIV sexual risk behaviors among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM) in Nigeria.
During his Yerby Fellowship, he plans to submit an NIH proposal to develop, implement and evaluate a culturally-relevant, behavioral intervention that aims to reduce sexual risk for HIV via counseling to improve coping strategies and cultivate resilience for adversity and discrimination experienced by this same population in Nigeria.