2014–2016 Cohort

Angie Boyce, PhD
Angie Boyce received her doctorate in science & technology studies from Cornell University, where she investigated historical and current instances of the development of government standards and technologies for regulating food safety and nutrition. As a Health & Society Scholar, Angie conducted a cross-case analysis of major public health emergencies, examining historical and contemporary debates about the infrastructure of the US public health system, and the interface between science and public health policy.

Rourke O’Brien, PhD
Rourke O’Brien is a sociologist who studies the connections between public policy, economic behavior, and population health. He holds a PhD in sociology and social policy from Princeton University, where he authored a dissertation on the social and structural determinants of self-reported disability. As a Health & Society Scholar, Rourke continued his research on how population health is impacted by household finance, taxation, and social policy.

Colleen Reid, PhD
Colleen Reid conducts research focused on the health effects of climate change. She received her PhD in environmental health from UC Berkeley, where her work included an epidemiological analysis of exposure to air pollution from northern California wildfires. In her work as an RWJF scholar, Colleen applied causal inference epidemiology to environmental hazards, with the aim of furthering understanding of population vulnerability vis-à-vis climate hazards and, ultimately, using this knowledge to increase environmental protection and impact health policy.

2013–2015 Cohort

Adam Lippert, PhD
Adam Lippert is a sociologist and demographer interested in how social disadvantage impacts physical and mental health during key stages in the life course. He recently completed a dual-title PhD at the Pennsylvania State University. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Adam is extending his research by developing more refined measures of the health environment and examining how multiple spatial territories simultaneously influence health.

Selena Ortiz, PhD
Selena Ortiz’s research integrates frame analysis to study how the public understands major social health issues and how public health can effectively address these health issues. She received her PhD in health policy and management from UCLA. As an RWJF fellow, Selena examines how health care decision-making processes throughout the life course, including disease prevention and treatment-seeking behavior, are influenced by frames.

Jessica Williams, PhD
Jessica Williams received a PhD from the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA in the department of health policy and management with a specialization in health economics. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Jessica has expanded her work in the area of occupational health by researching the implications of interventions to improve the physical and psychosocial work environment and looks at the impacts of the Affordable Care Act on the healthcare offerings of employers.

2012–2014 Cohort

Courtney Cogburn, PhD
Courtney D. Cogburn received her PhD in education and psychology from the University of Michigan. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, she focused on: 1) developing a multidimensional measure of racial stress and 2) the role of racial stress and other structural and psychosocial stressors in producing biological vulnerabilities in racial/ethnic minority populations. An overarching goal of Courtney’s research is to inform theoretical, empirical and measurement issues the use of “race” in health research.

Christina A. Roberto, PhD
Christina Roberto is a clinical psychologist and epidemiologist whose research examines public health policies aimed at reducing obesity. She received a joint-PhD from Yale University where she conducted research on menu labeling, front-of-package food labeling and child-targeted food marketing. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Christina expanded her work on food labeling and marketing and studied behavioral economic strategies to encourage nutritious food choices.

2011–2013 Cohort

Esther Friedman, PhD
Esther M. Friedman is a sociologist with an interest in social stratification as it relates to health and aging. She received a PhD in sociology from UCLA and a master’s degree in statistics from Columbia University. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, she examined the degree to which the resources of broader social contexts — extended kin, friends, and neighbors — influence population health.

Jennifer Karas Montez, PhD
Jennifer Karas Montez is a social demographer whose research examines socioeconomic and gender disparities in adult morbidity and mortality. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Jennifer investigated the social, psychological, and biological mechanisms that link educational attainment and mortality risk.

2010–2012 Cohort

Amy Non, PhD
Amy Non is a molecular anthropologist with an interest in researching the genetic and sociocultural contributors to racial inequalities in health. She received an MPH and PhD in anthropology from the University of Florida. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar at Harvard, she investigated the biological consequences of racism and other psychosocial stressors, particularly during early life developmental stages, as well as investigated epigenetic modifications that may occur as a result of early life exposures to stressors that may ultimately be linked to the development of chronic diseases.

Andrew Papachristos, PhD
Sociologist Andrew Papachristos focuses his studies on urban neighborhoods, social networks, street gangs, violent crime, and gun violence. His research uses social network analysis to the study of interpersonal violence, criminal organizations, and neighborhood level social processes. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Andrew expanded his use of network analysis to the study “crime epidemics” in U.S. cities, paying particular attention to the way violence diffuses among populations of youth. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Emily Shafer, PhD
Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer’s research explores the relationship between gender, marriage and family, and several behavioral and attitudinal outcomes, such as: employment, health and socio-political attitudes. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, she explored issues of gender inequality in families in regard to health. She received her PhD in sociology from Stanford University.

Alexander Tsai, PhD, MD
Alex Tsai is interested in how mental health, physical health, and health behaviors are deeply intertwined. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, he studied the social and economic correlates of depression and HIV-related stigma in a cohort of Ugandans accessing antiretroviral therapy; community-based screening for postpartum depression in a South African township; and the relationships between agricultural productivity, food security, gender empowerment, and HIV outcomes in rural Kenya. Alex was awarded an MA in economics from the University of Toronto, and MD and PhD in health services research from Case Western Reserve University. He completed his residency training in general adult psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco.

2009–2011 Cohort

Summer Hawkins, PhD
Summer Sherburne Hawkins is an epidemiologist with an interest in addressing policy-relevant research questions in maternal and child health. 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 RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Summer continued to address health disparities in the field of maternal and child health.

Jennifer Jennings, PhD
Jennifer Jennings is a sociologist who studies racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in educational and health outcomes. Her dissertation examined how government accountability systems that evaluate schools based on student outcomes affect educational inequality. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, she expanded her research to examine the relationship between early health and educational outcomes, and the effects of community-level shocks on population health. She received a PhD in sociology from Columbia University.

2008–2010 Cohort

Katie McLaughlin, PhD
Katie 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 PhD 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. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Katie broadened her research on risk factors to examine social determinants of adolescent psychopathology.

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. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Ari continued 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. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Elizabeth continued to develop innovative applications of mixed-methods biocultural approaches. She focused on political economic dimensions of health disparities and how material consumption and status influence patterns of income inequality and health. She received both a PhD in anthropology and a MPH from Northwestern University.

2007–2009 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 master’s in public health in epidemiology from Tulane University School of Public Health. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, he investigated how food availability in poor neighborhoods can directly impact disparities in chronic disease and assess ecological-level interventions to address such disparities.

Mahasin Mujahid, PhD
Mahasin Mujahid, received her PhD in epidemiology from the University of Michigan. She also holds a BS in mathematics from Xavier University and a MS in biostatistics from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation and her work as a RWJF Health & Society Scholar 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.

Margaret A. Sheridan, PhD
Margaret Sheridan received her PhD in clinical psychology from the UC Berkeley, and prior to receiving her degree she completed a clinical internship at NYU Child Study Center/Bellevue Hospital. 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). As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Margaret continued a cross-disciplinary investigation into the effect of environmental variables associated with SES on neural development.

2006–2008 Cohort

Kristi Pullen, PhD
Kristi Pullen received her PhD in molecular and cell biology from the UC Berkeley. Her thesis focused on the structural and functional characterization of PstP, the single Serine/Threonine phosphatase in M. tuberculosis. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Pullen implemented 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. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, Wray examined 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.

Kathleen Ziol-Guest, PhD
Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest received her PhD in public policy from the University of Chicago. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, she continued her research which 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.

2005–2007 Cohort

Jeffrey Bingenheimer, PhD
Jeffrey “Bart” 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 a PhD from the University of Michigan. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar, he continued his empirical research on heterogeneity in the spread of HIV, and the development and analysis of formal theoretical model that places health inequality within the broader context of a dynamic, intergenerational process of social stratification.

Duana Fullwiley, PhD
Duana Fullwiley, an anthropologist of science and medicine, received her PhD from UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West 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 a RWJF Health & Society Scholar she continued 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.

Kate Strully, PhD
Kate Strully received her PhD in sociology from New York University. Her research seeks to understand the causal pathways responsible for economic disparities in health, particularly how health influences-and is influenced by-social position. As a RWJF Health & Society Scholar she explored how social programs and policies (ranging from Medicaid to TANF to special education) mediate relationships between socioeconomic status and health. In this vein, she is concerned with the relationship between job loss, unemployment, and health.