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.

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.

Seth J. Prins, PhD MPH, is Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. He completed his doctoral training in the Department of Epidemiology, and his postdoctoral training in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences and the School of Social Work, at Columbia University. Dr. Prins's two programs of research concern the collateral consequences of mass incarceration for public health, and the effects of the social division and structure of labor on mental illness. Two questions have motivated his work to date: First, what are the theoretical and methodological assumptions underlying the growing use of psychiatric categories, such as antisocial personality, to explain and assess the risk of exposure to the criminal justice system, particularly in the context of mass incarceration? Second, what can we learn about the distribution and determinants of mental illness by examining social class as a dynamic relational process, rather than an individual attribute? Dr. Prins is also working on a project to study the role of adolescent substance use as determinant and consequence of the school-to- prison pipeline, disentangling individual risk, social determinants, and group disparities. Dr. Prins explores these questions at the intersections of epidemiology, sociology, and criminology, combining theory-driven analysis with advanced quantitative methods. He is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist interested in pushing the boundaries of the discipline to encompass rich social theory.

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.

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.

Past Research: Professor Edlund’s research focuses on the economics of gender and family, interests that have also led her to evolutionary biology and life-history analysis. Edlund’s past research has analyzed the impact of marriage and partner market conditions on sex allocation, with a particular focus on the status of females. She has studied son preference and sex selective abortion, dowry determination, why cities in the industrialized world are more female, and sex allocation at the individual level. She has also been interested in the importance of female inheritance for the gender wealth distribution. Another strand of her research has explored the legal framework governing formal marriages across cultures, an interest that has led to studies of markets for sex and children, consent regimes (parental or individual consent), and the alignment of political preferences along gender lines in the wake of the sexual revolution ushered in by the Pill.

Present Research: Edlund’s current research focuses on maternal conditions and child outcomes. One paper looks at male vulnerability in early life. While it is well known that males suffer higher mortality than females at all ages, particularly up until age one, it is less well known that males suffer more from poor maternal conditions; Edlund and colleagues document this phenomenon, studying perinatal and infant mortality in the United States. A second paper examines maternal malnutrition and long-term (adult) outcomes of offspring using the Chinese Great Leap Forward famine as a natural experiment. Maternal malnutrition remains a problem in many developing countries where pregnant and lactating women are high-risk groups for nutritional inadequacy. A third paper looks at cognitive effects of fetal low-level ionizing irradiation. Sweden received substantial radioactive fallout following the Chernobyl nuclear accident that took place in Ukraine in 1986. We find that Swedish children in utero at the time performed worse in their final year of compulsory school (at age 16) than their peers who were not exposed, and the damage was more severe for children born in areas that received more fallout. Doses to the Swedish population were such that the results are relevant for policy formulation relating to, e.g., radon exposure, medical procedures, radiation workers, and recommendations in the case of a terrorist attack involving a so-called dirty bomb.

Future Research: Future work will investigate whether there were earlier health manifestations presaging the observed effects for Swedish children (perinatal outcomes, in-patient records), as well as track this cohort as it ages and as additional outcomes (fertility, mortality, labor market) become available. We will also explore the role of parental socioeconomic status in buffering the health and labor market impact of negative shocks to cognitive ability. Other work will investigate the effects of paternal absence on teenage girls, and the relationship between height and mortality.

Julien Teitler Professor of Social Work and Sociology. He is a member of CPRC’s steering committee and co-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.

Dr. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn is the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College and the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. She is also the co-director of the National Center for Children and Families. Dr. Brooks-Gunn is a developmental psychologist who studies children, youth, and families over time. She is interested in the family and neighborhood conditions that influence how children and youth thrive or do not and how conditions at different ages influence development. She also does policy work as well as designing and evaluating interventions for children and families (home visiting clinic based programs, early childhood education programs, and after school programs).

Waldfogel is Compton Foundation Centennial Professor for the Prevention of Children's and Youth Problems, at the School of Social Work, and co-director of the CPRC. Waldfogel's research focuses on the effects of public policies on child and family well-being, both in the U.S. and cross-nationally. Current research interests include improving the measurement of poverty, work-family policies, and understanding socioeconomic status gaps in child development.

Heidi Allen, PhD, MSW, is an associate professor at 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 an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies. Her research examines how legacy and contemporary market and government processes in metropolitan areas shape racial inequality, with particular focus on the suburban Black middle class. Angela’s academic articles, published in the journal Phylon, include: (1) “The Veil of Racial Residential Segregation in the 21st Century: The Suburban Black Middle Class and Pursuit of Racial Equity”; and (2) “Racial Residential Segregation and School Choice: How a Market-based Policy for K-12 Access Creates a ‘Parenting Tax’ for Black Parents.” She also has extensive public policy experience. Before academia, she was a Presidential Management Fellow and legislative analyst for seven years at the federal government agency the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) within the Executive Office of the U.S. President, serving in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations. At OMB, Angela managed the clearance process for, edited, and approved policy documents the Justice Department submitted to Congress to ensure consistency with the President’s overall policy agenda. She completed her PhD in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2019. Angela holds a master's degree in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s in government from the College of William and Mary. She was born and raised in Woodbridge, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

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).