Who We Are

Yao Lu is a Professor of Sociology. She is a member of the CPRC’s committee on Research on Immigration/Migration. Lu’s research focuses on how migration and immigration intersect with social, economic, and political processes across diverse contexts. She conducts comparative research using large-scale datasets and a variety of quantitative methods. Her recent and ongoing projects include the impacts of demographic processes such as migration on political outcomes; the sources of racial/ethnic and nativity inequality among highly educated workers; immigrant labor market outcomes in the U.S. and Canada; and the consequences of parental migration for child well-being.

Veronica Barcelona, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University School of Nursing, a public health nurse, and a reproductive epidemiologist. Her program of research is focused on understanding preterm birth through the study of epigenomics, stressors such as racism and discrimination, and cardiovascular risk factors. Barcelona assesses electronic health records to examine the use of stigmatizing language and how it affects maternal morbidity outcomes. Through the utilization of multi-omic methods, she hopes to reduce inequities in pregnancy and adverse birth outcomes for women and families of color.

I am an Associate Professor of Developmental Psychology in the Department of Human Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. I study educational policies designed to promote the cognitive and socio-emotional development of children from underserved communities. I worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at New York University, and I received my Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Irvine in 2017.

I am currently working on several large-scale, longitudinal, studies of early childhood development, including evaluations of the Chicago School Readiness Project, the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K program, and the Building Blocks preschool mathematics curriculum. Across my projects, I seek understand whether interventions designed to boost children’s early cognitive and behavioral skills will make long-lasting changes on developmental outcomes.

Thomas A. DiPrete is Giddings Professor of Sociology, co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), co-director of the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality at Columbia University, and a faculty member of the Columbia Population Research Center.  DiPrete holds a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.  He has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago, Duke University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison as well as Columbia. DiPrete’s research interests include social stratification, demography, education, economic sociology, and quantitative methodology.  A specialist in comparative research, DiPrete has held research appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the Social Science Research Center – Berlin, the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the University of Amsterdam.  His recent and ongoing projects include the study of gender differences in educational performance, educational attainment, and fields of study, the determinants of college persistence and dropout in the U.S., a comparative study of how educational expansion and the structure of linkages between education and the labor market contribute to earnings inequality in several industrialized countries, and the study of how social comparison processes affect the compensation of corporate executives.

An economist and journalist by training, Dr. Kaushal is an expert on comparative immigration policy and the author of a new book on this topic, Blaming Immigrants.

She is professor of Social Policy and chair of the doctoral program at Columbia School of Social Work. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at IZA, the Institute of Labor Economics (Bonn, Germany).

Her current research includes labor market impacts of foreign-trained registered nurses and physicians, how immigration of foreign-trained physicians impacts healthcare use and health outcomes of the U.S. population, cross-national research on immigration in the United States and Canada, the impact of local policies (such as local immigration enforcement and state DREAM Acts) on the health and mental health of undocumented immigrants, the effect of the Syrian refugee crisis on electoral preferences in Turkey, and the long-term impact of tribal resettlement in India.

Dr. Kaushal is the author of Blaming Immigrants: Nationalism and the Economics of Global Movement (2018, Columbia University Press), in which she investigates the core causes of rising disaffection towards immigrants globally and tests common complaints against immigration. She has authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters on immigrants and other vulnerable populations. She writes a monthly column in the Economic Times, India’s largest financial daily, and she is currently working on a documentary on tribesfolk in India.

She holds a BA in economics from Sri Ram College of Commerce (India), an MA in economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and a PhD in economics from the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York.

Natalie Hiromi Brito is an Associate Professor in the Psychology department at Columbia University and director of the Infant Studies of Learning and Neurocognitive Development (ISLAND) Lab. Her research examines how social and cultural environments influence brain and behavioral development in young children. Dr. Brito's research focuses on understanding how to better support caregivers and create conditions that promote healthy child development. Her lab studies how factors in the home environment— including caregiver mental health and the quality of parent-child interactions—affect the development of attention, memory, and social-emotional skills in infants and toddlers. Through this research, Dr. Brito aims to identify the environmental factors that best support early childhood development and inform evidence-based approaches to helping families thrive.

Matthew Neidell is Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Mailman School of Public Health. His fields of interest lie at the intersection of environmental, health, and labor economics. Neidell's research primarily focuses on how people respond to changes in the environment, and how the environment affects human well-being, including health, human capital, and productivity.

Julien Teitler is Professor of Social Work and Sociology, and co-director of the Columbia Population Research Center. He is also a member of CPRC’s steering committee and directs the Computing and Methods Core. Teitler’s research focuses on social determinants of health and fertility. Recent studies include cross-national comparisons of fertility trends, health, and health disparities; the effect of neighborhood racial composition on birth outcomes; the measurement of neighborhood contexts; the health trajectories of immigrants in the U.S.; and the consequences of elective Caesarians.

Professor and Deputy Chair for Doctoral Studies

Co-Director, Columbia Population Research Center

Steering Committee Member, Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality

Biography

Jennifer S. Hirsch is Professor and Deputy Chair for Doctoral Studies in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences and co-Director of the Columbia Population Research Center. A medical anthropologist and a 2012 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Hirsch’s research agenda spans five intertwined domains: the anthropology of love; gender, sexuality and migration; sexual, reproductive and HIV risk practices; social scientific research on sexual assault and undergraduate well-being, and the intersections between anthropology and public health. In addition to her many articles in leading social science and public health journals, Hirsch’s books include A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families (University of California Press, 2003), which explores changing ideas and practices of love, sexuality and marriage among Mexicans in the U.S. and in Mexico, and the coauthored The Secret: Love, Marriage and HIV (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), which drew on NIH-funded comparative ethnographic research to analyzes the social organization of extramarital sexual practices in Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua-New Guinea and the implications of those practices for married women's HIV risk. Along with Dr. Claude Ann Mellins, Hirsch co-directed the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), a study supported by Columbia University that examines sexual health and sexual assault among Columbia and Barnard undergraduates. She is the co-author, with sociologist Shamus Khan, of Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus.

Dr. Hirsch has been an active contributor to the intellectual life of CPRC. She is a founding member of the Center who for many years led the Gender, Sexuality, Health and HIV Primary Research Area (now the Reproductive Health and HIV Primary Research Area), and continues to participate in its events, as well as in those of the Migration and Immigration group.

Heidi Allen, PhD, MSW, is a professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work. She studies the impact of social policies, like Medicaid– America’s health insurance for the poor – on health and financial well-being. She is a former emergency department social worker and spent several years in state health policy, where she focused on health system redesign and public health insurance expansions. Dr. Allen is currently involved in a variety of research projects focused on social policy at the intersection of health and poverty.

Gerard Torrats-Espinosa is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. 

His research draws from the literatures on urban sociology, stratification, and criminology, and it focuses on understanding how the spatial organization of the American stratification system creates and reproduces inequalities. His current research agenda investigates how the neighborhood context, particularly the experience of community violence, determines the life chances of children; how social capital and social organization emerge and evolve in spatial contexts; and how place and geography structure educational and economic opportunity in America and elsewhere.

His work has been published in numerous academic journals, including the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Urban Economics, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Gerard holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University and a Master in Public Policy from Harvard University.

Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat is the Mallya Chair in Women and Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received a B.A. in political economy and mathematics at Williams College in 1999, a master's degree in public policy from the Ford School at the University of Michigan in 2001, and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. In 2010 she served as Senior Economist for Labor, Education, and Welfare at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Her research focuses on the intergenerational dynamics of poverty and inequality.

The goal of Dan Belsky's work is to reduce social inequalities in aging outcomes in the US and elsewhere. His research sits at the intersection of public health, population & behavioral science, and genomics. His studies seek to understand how genes and environments combine to shape health across the life course. Belsky's research uses tools from genome science and longitudinal data from population-based cohort studies. The aim is to identify targets for policy and clinical interventions to promote positive development from early life and extend healthspan. Belsky is a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Child Brain Development Network and from 2016-2018 was an Early Career Fellow of the Jacobs Foundation. 

Dr. Carmela Alcántara is an Associate Professor at Columbia University School of Social Work, Faculty Affiliate of the Social Intervention Group, Faculty of the Columbia Population Research Center, and Director of the Sleep, Mind, and Health Research Program. She is a clinical psychological scientist with expertise in social epidemiology and behavioral medicine. Her interdisciplinary program of research integrates frameworks and methodologies from psychology, public health, social work, and medicine to study how contextual factors (i.e., immigrant status, socioeconomic status, race) shape exposure to psychosocial risks and resources (acculturation, transnational ties, discrimination, stress, anxiety), and their association with sleep, mental health, and cardiovascular health in underserved populations, particularly in Latina/o/x immigrant communities. A long-term goal of Dr. Alcántara’s research is to develop community-engaged and evidence-based behavioral interventions to reduce disparities in mental health care and promote health equity. She has obtained nearly $3 million dollars from federal sources and private foundations, including a K23 award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to study sleep and minority health, and an R01 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to conduct a randomized controlled trial of a digital behavioral sleep medicine intervention culturally adapted for Spanish-speaking primary care patients. Dr. Alcántara has held national leadership positions and provides sought after expertise in Latina/o/x immigrant and minority health, health psychology, behavioral sleep medicine, and social determinants of health.

Dr. Brooke S. West is an Assistant Professor at the Columbia School of Social Work and Faculty Affiliate of the Social Intervention Group (SIG). As a medical sociologist, Dr. West’s research focuses on the social, economic, physical and policy factors underlying inequities in health among marginalized and criminalized populations, both globally and domestically. Drawing on both social science and public health approaches, her work centers primarily on the social and structural determinants of substance use and HIV/STI, with newer work examining violence exposure and reproductive health. Dr. West is the principal investigator on a NIDA-funded study that examines the intersection of venue-based risk and networks for substance-using women in Tijuana, Mexico, with the goal of capturing the dynamic and overlapping nature of risk environments and how connections to and movement between places can confer health risks. The integration of place-based and network methods, both of which have wide applicability for addressing health inequities in diverse settings, will inform the development of novel intervention approaches that seek to reshape environments and create safer spaces. Dr. West also works on projects related to overdose among women and the health of women more broadly, including the evaluation and development of sexual and reproductive health programs in Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, and the United States.         Before joining the School of Social Work, Dr. West was an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) with a dual appointment in the Department of Sociology. Prior to her appointment as an Assistant Professor at UCSD she was a Postdoctoral Fellow on a T32 focused on substance use and infectious diseases. Dr. West received her Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and her M.A. in Sociology from Cornell University.

          Angela Simms is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard College-Columbia University. She studies the political economy of U.S. metropolitan areas, more specifically, the capacity of suburban Black middle-class jurisdictions to provide high-quality public goods and services. Angela has a forthcoming book, titled: Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia, which will be published in February of 2026. 
         She has published articles related to local government financial capacity, including “Fiscal Fragility in Black Middle-Class Suburbia and Consequences for K-12 Public Schools,” in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences (2023); and “COVID-19, Black Jurisdictions, and Budget Constraints: How Fiscal Footing Shapes Fighting the Virus,” in Racial and Ethnic Studies (2021). 
         Angela serves as a co-chair of Columbia Population Research Center’s Working Group on Urbanism and Neighborhoods. She is also on the editorial board of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity Journal. During the 2023-2024 academic year, Angela was a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar. 
         Prior to academia, Angela served in the federal government for seven years as a Presidential Management Fellow and legislative analyst at the Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations.

Dr. Rundle is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Mailman School of Public Health. He is a member of CPRC’s steering committee and directs the CPRC’s Geographic Information Systems consulting service. Dr. Rundle’s work focuses on the causes, and cancer related consequences, of obesity, with a major focus on how neighborhood built and social environments shape physical activity, dietary patterns, and in turn, obesity risk. He and his team are also developing new methods to measure neighborhood contexts and apply these data to studying neighborhood effects on health. You can visit his team web site, Built Environmental and Health Research Group, here (beh.columbia.edu).