Irma T. Elo

Irma T. Elo has a PhD in Demography and Public Affairs from Princeton University. She currently is the Chair of the Sociology Department and Chair of the Graduate Group in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her main research interests center on socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in health and mortality across the life course and demographic estimation of mortality. In recent years, she has extended this focus to include health and mortality among racial/ethnic immigrant subgroups. She has studied socioeconomic inequalities in mortality in developed countries, the contribution of early life circumstances to health and mortality in later life, socioeconomic mortality inequalities, and the role of obesity and diabetes in mortality in the United States. Dr. Elo has also contributed to improved mortality estimates among African Americans, the contribution of causes of death to black-white differences in mortality, the role of return migration in the Hispanic mortality advantage, and health and mortality among the foreign born relative to their U.S. born counterparts.

Nick Graetz

Nick Graetz is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Eviction Lab at the University of Princeton. He completed a joint PhD in Demography and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021, writing his dissertation on the relational role of place in the production of racial stratification. He received his BS at the University of Wisconsin in Social Psychology and Political Science, and he finished his MPH at the University of Washington. He worked at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, where he was a Researcher on the geospatial analysis team. Nick is interested in using physical space as a proxy for institutionalized inequity and the intersection of spatial epidemiology with social science. He considers social justice and health equity to be his highest priorities in public health research. He is broadly interested in community organizing, resegregation, social determinants of health, data visualization, and Bayesian hierarchical modeling.

Arun S. Hendi

Arun S. Hendi is the Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Dr. Hendi completed his joint PhD in Demography and Sociology as well as his MA in Economics and BA in Economics and Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on inequalities in health and mortality, the sociology of marriage and family, and formal demography. His current projects include a study of the narrowing of black-white life expectancy gaps since 1990 and an examination of life expectancy differentials across the urban-rural continuum. All of his research is unified by a strong focus on social theory and the application and development of cutting-edge demographic methods.

Jessica Y. Ho

Jessica Y. Ho is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Demography at The Pennsylvania State University. She completed her joint PhD in Demography and Sociology as well as her BA in Economics and Health & Societies from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ho is a demographer and sociologist who studies the social determinants of health and mortality. Her research seeks to explain differences in life expectancy and health over the life course across populations. Her three major areas of research examine why American life expectancy lags behind other high-income countries, socioeconomic and racial/ethnic health inequalities, and health and aging in developing countries. Several of her current research projects investigate the drivers of and broader social implications of the contemporary American drug overdose epidemic.

Anneliese Luck

Anneliese Luck is a PhD candidate in Demography and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an affiliated student with the Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science. She holds her BA in International Relations and Economic Development from Tufts University and an MPP with a Graduate Certificate in Applied Data Science from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Anneliese’s current interests lie at the intersection of social demography and public policy, focusing on how various social and policy contexts work to influence the lives and deaths of individuals across the United States. She is particularly interested in examining how the link between place, health, and mortality may vary across racial, spatial, and demographic lines. Some of her recent work includes a project in which she applied demographic life table methods to understand how state-driven family destabilization operates in the lives of children across the U.S., as well as a project in which she examined the link between local carceral contexts and age-, race-, and sex-specific mortality in U.S. counties. Anneliese is also a contributor on projects that aim to investigate racial and cause of death variation in Covid-19 excess mortality and a contributor to a project that investigates the role of state eviction bans in mitigating the mental health costs of the pandemic. Currently, she is developing a project that aims to capture place-based historical patterns of mortality over the several past decades, examining how the recent Covid-19 crisis may have differentially disrupted these trajectories across the United States.

Eugenio Paglino

Eugenio Paglino is completing his PhD in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a BSc and a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. He has previously worked at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute as a research intern in the Generations and Gender Programme. Before becoming a PhD candidate, he worked as a research assistant at the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. There he joined the IFAMID project under the supervision of Prof. Arnstein Aassve and investigated the impact of Chinese aid on women empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa. His broad research interests include the population-environment interaction, migration, the computational social sciences, and inequality. He loves visualising data and is interested in studying ways in which data visualisation can help researchers to communicate more clearly and to reach a wider audience. 

Samuel H. Preston

Samuel H. Preston is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His major research interest is in the health of populations. Dr. Preston has written primarily about mortality trends and patterns in large aggregates, including twentieth century mortality transitions and black/white differentials in the United States. Recent research has focused on the mortality effects of cigarette smoking and obesity in developed countries. Other recent research projects address the future of American fertility and the demographic causes of population aging.

Andrew C. Stokes

Andrew C. Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. He completed his joint PhD in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. His research applies the analytic tools of demography to population health, with a focus on social determinants of health and health disparities across the life course.

Yana C. Vierboom

Yana C. Vierboom is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Population Health Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. She completed a joint PhD degree in Demography and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, writing her dissertation on contemporary trends and social inequalities in adult mortality in the US. Dr. Vierboom’s work explores social inequalities in adult health and mortality, particularly at older ages. She received her BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University.