My primary research highlights how social inequalities affect trends in chronic diseases, disability, and early death. I also develop and advance demographic and statistical methods for estimating trends in health and social phenomena. In general, I use novel quantitative and demographic techniques to explore how political and historical processes differentially shape health and mortality outcomes among adult populations. In much of this work, I take a long-term sociohistorical perspective to consider cohort differences in life course processes related to health – for example, how the adverse mortality effects of early-life exposures can change across birth cohorts (Pop & Dev Review 2018). I also investigate how period-based changes in policies and institutional practices can affect health outcomes. For example, I have shown how racialized changes in obstetric practices have likely affected trends in U.S. birth outcomes such as shifts in gestational age and declines in birth weight (Demography 2020, JHSB 2023). Recently, I documented the unequal mortality consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic among high-income countries and U.S. populations (The BMJ 2021, JAMA Network Open 2022, AJE 2023).
keywords
life course, health, mortality, social demography, quantitative methods
