Florencia Torche (PhD in Sociology, Columbia University) is a social scientist with expertise in social demography and social stratification. Her research and writing focus on social inequality and social mobility, educational disparities, and marriage and family dynamics. Her recent scholarship studies the influence of early-life exposures and circumstances –starting before birth– on individual health, development, and wellbeing using natural experiments and causal inference approaches. She was elected to the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2023, and to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. She has led large collaborative data collection projects, including the first national social mobility surveys in Chile and in Mexico.
Ernesto F. L. Amaral (Ph.D. in Sociology/Demography, University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor in the department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Dr. Amaral’s research interests are related to social demography, migration, and public policy analysis. His teaching interests include demography and migration, methods and social statistics, and public policy analysis. Prior to joining Texas A&M University, Dr. Amaral was an associate sociologist at the RAND Corporation and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School from 2014 to 2017. He served as an assistant/associate professor in the Political Science Department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, from 2009 to 2014.
David Lam (Ph.D. in Economics, University of California at Berkeley) is a research professor and the director of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Dr. Lam’s research focuses on the interaction of economics and demography in developing countries, including analysis of the economics of population growth, fertility, marriage, and aging. Current research projects include analysis of the links between education and income inequality in Brazil and South Africa, the impact of demographic change on labor markets, and the links between birth rates and education in developing countries. He is collaborating with researchers from the University of Cape Town on projects analyzing youth transitions in education, childbearing, and employment using the Cape Area Panel Study, a longitudinal survey supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Duncan Thomas (Ph.D. in Economics, Princeton University) is a professor of Economics, Global Health and Public Policy for the Department of Economics at Duke University. Dr. Thomas investigates the inter-relationships between health, human capital and socio-economic status with a focus on the roles that individual, family and community factors play in improving levels of health and well-being across the globe. Much of this work highlights resource allocation and decision-making within households and families. His research uses data from large-scale population based longitudinal surveys that he has designed and fielded in collaboration with Elizabeth Frankenberg and other colleagues in the U.S., Indonesia and Mexico. These include the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), the Work and Iron Status Evaluation (WISE), the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR) and the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS). He was the founding director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Development Economics program.