Cohorts:
2003-2005; 2004-2006; 2005-2007; 2006-2008; 2007-2009; 2008-2010; 2009-2011; 2010-2012; 2011-2013

Cohort 9 2011-2013

Danya Keene, PhD

Danya Keene received her PhD in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of Michigan in 2009.  She was also predoctoral and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center.  Her mixed-methods research broadly explores how social policies contribute to health inequality. Specifically, her work has examined how urban revitalization and public housing demolition may affect the health of low-income African American communities in Chicago, Atlanta and nationally. This research has considered how relocation and displacement may affect access to geographically-rooted social ties and the health promoting resources that they provide. Her work has also examined how stigma associated with public housing and urban poverty may affect the well-being of those who reside in, or relocate from discursively condemned places. This concept of ‘spatial stigma’ is an understudied mechanism by which place affects health, and one that Dr. Keene is continuing to examine in different contexts.  As a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar, Dr. Keene will continue to work on issues related to residential mobility, geographic rootedness, place and health equity. For example, she is developing a mixed-methods project to explore the lived experiences and health consequences of home foreclosure in low-income Philadelphia communities. 

Van C. Tran, PhD

Van Tran is a sociologist whose mixed-methods research broadly focuses on the socioeconomic, civic and political incorporation of post-1965 immigrants and their children, as well as its implications for the future of ethnic and racial inequality in the U.S.  Specifically, his research has explored the incorporation of Hispanics/Latinos, local and national influences on attitudes towards immigrants, how neighborhood matters for the second-generation in New York City, as well as how increasing ethnic/racial diversity affects neighborhood local processes in Boston.  As a Health & Society Scholar, he will examine how growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods affects mental and physical health outcomes among the immigrant second-generation, as well as how cultural, structural and biological factors interact to shape health disparities both across and within ethno-racial groups.  Van received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University and will begin as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University upon completion of the Health & Society Scholars Program in July 2013.

Cohort 8 2010-2012

Andrew Deener, PhD

Andrew Deener is an urban sociologist and community ethnographer who studies neighborhoods, culture, politics, and inequality.  He is currently completing a book, based on six years of ethnographic and historical research, about the politics of urban change in the Los Angeles coastal community of Venice.  This book examines how gentrification, homelessness, and immigration have simultaneously transformed five adjacent neighborhoods in Venice since the 1970s, and why some neighborhoods have sustained racial, ethnic, and/or socioeconomic diversity while others have become increasingly homogeneous.  As a Health and Society Scholar, Andrew will study food inequalities in the city.  He is particularly interested in examining how sustainable food sources have become integrated into urban life, the unequal distribution of these resources, and the ways in which residents of low-income neighborhoods overcome constraints in order to gain access to healthier options.  Andrew received his PhD from UCLA in 2008 and is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut.

Amy Gonzales, PhD (2010)

Amy Gonzales received her BA in psychology from UCSD in 2001. She has a MA in social psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and a MA in communication from Cornell. She is currently completing her PhD in communication from Cornell. Amy’s research examines the effect communication technology has on identity, various attitudes and well-being. She has worked with computer scientists, social scientists and physicians to explore ways to use take advantage of digital technology to promote health behaviors. In particular, she has looked at the effects of social media (e.g. texting, Facebook, blogs) on important psychological states (e.g. Facebook and self-esteem) and physical health (e.g. mobile games and adolescent eating patterns). As a Health and Society Scholar she is interested in how daily communication using digital technology influences perceptions of social support. She is particularly interested in how different cultural groups construct different norms of use depending on factors like access to technology and cultural communication patterns. She hopes to understand how technology may both contribute to and detract from social support and health in order to inform policy development on access to digital technologies. 

Laura Tach, PhD

Laura Tach is a sociologist who studies the consequences of neighborhood inequality and housing policy for individual and collective well-being. She received her M.A. in sociology and her Ph.D. in social policy from Harvard University. Laura’s dissertation examines the social consequences of housing policies that deconcentrate poverty by replacing public housing projects with mixed-income developments. She used a variety of methods – quantitative and spatial analyses of secondary datasets, archival research on neighborhoods, and in-depth interviews with residents – to examine the social dynamics of economically integrated neighborhoods. She has also studied the causes and consequences of complex family structures. As a Health and Society Scholar, Laura will study the health effects of housing policy. In particular, she will examine the effect of urban housing policies on neighborhood health environments and resident health behaviors, and the broader implications of housing interventions for population health. In 2012, she will join the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University.

Michael Bader, PhD

Michael Bader received his B.A. in architecture and art history from Rice University and received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in the summer of 2009.  He has also been a research associate with the Built Environment and Health Project at Columbia University.  His research, including his dissertation, traces the growth and influence of emergent types of neighborhood change such as gentrification on residential preferences and how, after moving to a neighborhood, residents’ risks of obesity and levels of physical activity are associated with the residential environments of the neighborhoods where they live.  In pursuing this research, he has also developed methodological tools to characterize aspects of the physical environment at different geographic scales.  As a Health and Society Scholar, Mike will investigate the degree to which neighborhood social and economic disparities in health outcomes result from residents with similar individual-level risks moving to the same neighborhoods compared to the degree these disparities result from the shared environmental exposures experienced by residents of the same neighborhood.  Building on this research, he is also interested in examining how housing policy can be used to reduce health disparities in urban settings.

Alison Buttenheim, PhD

Alison Buttenheim is a public health researcher and social demographer who studies child health and wellbeing.  Her dissertation assessed children’s nutritional status in vulnerable communities in Asia, examining how households protect children from health and economic shocks. She has also completed several studies of marriage and reproductive health in Indonesia. Most recently, as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research, she has conducted research on social disparities in chronic disease risk in the Mexican and Mexican-American populations. As a Health & Society Scholar, Alison plans to investigate the role of parental attitudes, beliefs, and decision-making in determining child health, focusing on two outcomes in particular: vaccine refusal and childhood obesity. Using the techniques and frameworks of experimental psychology, behavioral economics, and social networks analysis, she will examine how diverse forces ranging from the media and the internet to peer norms and altruism shape the decision architecture that parents inhabit when making choices about their children’s health. Alison received her Ph.D. in Public Health at UCLA in 2007. She also holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in history from Yale University.

Jooyoung Lee is an urban ethnographer who studies race, culture, crime, and mental health in the inner-city.  His dissertation examines the careers of aspiring rappers from South Central Los Angeles.  In addition to showing how rappers organize their lives around “blowing up,” a local term for achieving stardom in the music industry, he reveals new insights into how urban youth view pathways to upward mobility.  As a Health and Society Scholar, Jooyoung will examine how street violence shapes the mental health of inner-city youth.  In particular, Jooyoung is interested in describing the everyday social situations that trigger fear and anxiety about potential street violence.  As a graduate student, Jooyoung received funding from the American Sociological Association´s Minority Fellowship Program, which is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).  Jooyoung received a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2009, and received Bachelor of Arts Degrees in Political Science and Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley in 2003.  

Sarah Gollust, PhD

Sarah Gollust received her PhD in health policy at the University of Michigan.  She is broadly interested in studying the media's influence on public opinion and public health policy, particularly with regard to health disparities and the social determinants of health.  In her dissertation work, she evaluates the impact of media coverage of type 2 diabetes on the public's support for strategies to prevent diabetes.  Her other research interests include the social and policy implications of new genetic technologies and public health ethics.

Eran Magen, PhD

Eran received his MA in education and PhD in psychology from Stanford University. His research focuses on two topics: (1) Supportive interactions - how people give and receive effective, healthy, and sustainable emotional support. (2) Temptations and self-control - why we do things that we know we are going to regret, and how to do less of them. In the rest of his life, Eran enjoys playing guitar, practicing martial arts, dancing Argentine tango, drumming, and jumping over things. http://www.EranMagen.com.

Samir Soneji, PhD

Samir Soneji received a BS in Mathematics at the University of Chicago, MA in Statistics at Columbia University, and PhD in Demography at Princeton University.  His research interests include formal demography, disability, mortality, and reproductive health.  His current work examines the relationship between the future of mortality and the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.  His other work has furthered demographic methodology in measuring healthy life expectancy and has applied this advance to assess racial and sex disparities across birth cohorts.  Samir's future work will take a broader look at disability and its consequences throughout the life course.

Samir Soneji's Home Page

Kevin Haninger, PhD

Kevin Haninger is a health economist who studies theoretical and empirical questions on the value of risks to health and life, the economic evaluation of health and medicine, and the development of quantitative methods to address ethical issues in resource allocation decisions. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Agriculture. His current projects include the development of stated preference methods to value morbidity risks and an examination of the technical and moral problems that arise when incorporating concerns for equity into cost-effectiveness analysis. As a Health and Society Scholar, Kevin seeks to strengthen the intersection between the social sciences and bioethics by exploring how empirical data on public values can inform ethical problems in health policy. He received his Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University and A.B. in Psychology from Stanford University.

Sabrina B. McCormick, PhD

Sabrina McCormick’s areas of expertise are in environmental and medical sociology, science and technology studies, social movements and development. She is primarily interested in the social contestation, politics and science that inform understandings of environmentally-induced illness. Dr. McCormick is currently completing her first book, No Family History: Finding the Environmental Links to Breast Cancer (Rowman & Littlefield), which explores the conflicts and controversies over shifting paradigms of breast cancer causation. She is directing a documentary film by the same title (www.nofamilyhistory.org) that will be released with the book. As a Health and Society Scholar, she will be studying one of the most pressing public health issues of the twenty-first century – illnesses induced by climate change. She will study the social, economic and scientific aspects, including current policies and interventions, programs funded by private corporations, and dynamics of scientific change engendered by the need to address illness outcomes. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Brown University in 2005 and has since been jointly appointed in the Department of Sociology and the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University.

Dawn Alley, PhD

Dawn Alley completed her Ph.D. in Gerontology at the University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology. Her education in gerontology prepared her to use a multidisciplinary approach and lifecourse perspective to study the complex issues surrounding aging and health. Her research focuses on ways to integrate biological and social perspectives on late-life social and ethnic health disparities in disability, frailty, and cognition. She is particularly interested in using biomarkers to understand variation in health trajectories among older people. In her dissertation, she examined socioeconomic differences in biomarkers of inflammation and the relationships between inflammation and cognitive decline. As a Health and Society Scholar, she plans to continue and expand this research by exploring the ways in which inflammation mediates the relationships between infectious and chronic disease. She is also interested in working to integrate psychological and biologic al perspectives on stress in aging and in studying the relationship between early life experiences and health trajectories later in life.

James Macinko, PhD

James Macinko is a health services researcher focusing on primary health care. Since 2003 he has worked as assistant professor of public health at New York University. His research focuses on measuring the impact of health reforms and policy changes, developing tools to evaluate primary care performance, and exploring the broader role of health systems and services in the production and potential reduction of global health disparities. As a Health and Society Scholar he hopes to explore the impact of access to appropriate care over the life course on the emergence and widening of racial/ethnic and SES-related health differentials, document perceptions of health providers and payers of the causes of health inequalities, and explore how global comparisons can enhance our knowledge of the determinants of health inequalities in the United States. Over the course of his career, Dr. Macinko hopes to bring a more global and population health-oriented perspective to health services research.

Vida Maralani, PhD

Vida Maralani studies educational inequality and social stratification. She studies both the mechanisms that create educational inequality and the effect of educational inequality on other aspects of social inequality such as the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status. For example, her dissertation estimates the effects of increases in women’s education on the education of the next generation. She shows how intergenerational effects work both through individual level processes, and also through changes in family size and family structure that have compositional effects at the population level. As a Health and Society Scholar, Vida will investigate the mechanisms that relate educational inequality and health disparities. She is interested in how race/ethnic differences in the effects of education on health may widen or shrink health disparities between groups. She’s also interested in understanding the relationship between educational trajectories and health trajectories in adolescence and early adulthood. Vida holds a MA in history and in sociology, and will complete a Ph.D. in sociology in July 2006 at UCLA. She has also worked as a public policy analyst in the fields of education, youth and poverty.

Cohort 3 2005-2007

Carolyn C. Cannuscio, ScD

Carolyn Cannuscio is a social epidemiologist by training, a chronic disease epidemiologist in practice, and a teacher/learner at heart. During her undergraduate education in a Health and Society program at Brown University, Dr. Cannuscio caught the epidemiology bug through exposure to classes that examined environment, behavior, and disease. These classes ignited her interest in the determinants of health and illness, especially in an aging population. To follow that interest, she pursued formal social epidemiology training at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she worked with the Nurses’ Health and Health Professionals Studies investigators to examine the health effects of women’s employment status, social ties, and caregiving responsibilities. After completing her doctoral training at Harvard, Dr. Cannuscio shifted gears and conducted health outcomes and epidemiology research at Merck, where she first developed health promotion programs for elderly managed care enrollees. Her later research examined determinants of cardiovascular risk, with a focus on the widely used COX-2 inhibitors. Her collaborative research on Vioxx contributed evidence of increased heart attack risk in users of that drug, which was removed from the market in the fall of 2004.During her tenure as an RWJ Health and Society Scholar, Dr. Cannuscio plans to examine social factors that promote lifelong health and vital involvement in an aging population. She is particularly interested in community development strategies, housing options, and policy initiatives that foster health, sustain high functional status, and enrich quality of life for families--and especially for elders. She has a particular interest in intergenerational exchange and social/civic engagement throughout the life course. Over the course of her career, Dr. Cannuscio hopes to build the field of population health by engaging undergraduates and cultivating their interest in the profound influence of social forces on health outcomes.

David T. Grande, MD, MPA

David Grande is a general internist and recently completed a Masters in Public Affairs (MPA) at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He completed his residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 2003 and graduated from the Ohio State University College of Medicine in 1999. Prior to residency, he served a full-time, one-year term as president of the American Medical Student Association working in their Washington-area office on issues related to access to health care and health disparities. He recently worked on behalf of the City of Philadelphia Department of Public Health to develop a plan to improve access to services and overall public health in response to a voter-initiated city charter change. As a Health and Society Scholar, he is studying the relationship between health systems and local communities and the determinants and consequences of variations in trust. He is also exploring issues pertaining to medical professionalism

Annice E. Kim, PhD, MPH

Annice Kim received her Ph.D. in Health Behavior & Health Education from the University of North Carolina School of Public Health. Her primary research interest is to understand the impact of media and technology on health and society, and to develop innovative applications and policies that utilize new media to improve population health. Her dissertation examined the sales and marketing practices of Internet cigarette vendors, factors motivating smokers to purchase cigarettes online, and legislative attempts to regulate online cigarette sales. Her dissertation work was funded with competitive grants from the Association of Schools of Public Health and the RWJ Substance Abuse Policy Research Program. As a Health & Society Scholar, she is examining the role of media and communication in improving population health. One of her projects examines the coverage of racial health disparities in newspaper media, how attributions of responsibility for causes and solutions for racial health disparities have been framed, and whether framing varies by diversity of newspaper staff and their media markets. She earned her M.P.H. in epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health, and her B.A. in molecular and cell biology, with a minor in philosophy from University of California, Berkeley.

Elizabeth M. Wildsmith, PhD

Elizabeth Wildsmith received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in December of 2004. While there she developed a strong interest in several areas of social demography, including the complex relationships that exist between social context, the family, individual level disadvantage, and individual well-being. Her dissertation, titled "Non-Marital among Mexican American Women: Exploring the Role of Social Context", looked at race/ethnic differences in the transition to adulthood. Building on this work, she plans to focus more closely on how social and family contexts are defined and measured, which contexts are relevant for whom, and which mechanisms link these contexts to individual well-being. She is interested in how social and family contexts may increase exposure to, or offer protection from, risk factors associated with negative health outcomes. She has also returned to her earlier interest in teenage fertility and is working on projects which look both at the causes and consequences of teenage and nonmarital fertility. With collaborators at Penn she is 1) exploring the role pre-teen literacy and reading skill has on teenage childbearing and 2) examining how recent changes in teenage and nonmarital fertility have impacted the wellbeing of women and children. She continues to be particularly interested in whether Mexican American women are affected in similar ways as Black women by their minority status within the United States, or whether a distinct ethnic heritage and/or ethnic experience independently affects their well-being.

Cohort 2 2004-2006

Patrick M. Krueger, PhD

Patrick M. Krueger is a sociologist who studies the social stratification of health, with a particular focus on understanding the mechanisms that lead to race/ethnic, sex, and class disparities in health over the life-course. Specifically, he examines how individuals convert social, cultural, and economic resources into health through health promoting behaviors; how family and neighborhood dynamics shape health and mortality outcomes; and how intra-individual factors shape orientations toward health and health trajectories over time. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Colorado and his B.A. in sociology and psychology from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI.

Chyvette T. Williams, PhD

Chyvette T. Williams holds an MPH degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Health Policy and Management from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For the past nine years, Dr. Williams has been involved in HIV and drug abuse research, both domestically and internationally. She was awarded funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to complete her dissertation -a multilevel study examining the effects of neighborhood disadvantage and personal networks on patterns of drug use among inner-city drug users. Her primary research interests are in urban and minority health, social problems (e.g. substance use, poverty, and crime), and in the effects of social networks and supports on health risks. As an RWJ Health and Society Scholar, Dr. Williams conducted research that examined health behaviors in context and explored innovative approaches to addressing urban social problems. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Health Policy and Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. Additionally, she is the Associate Director for the Community Outreach Intervention Project, an HIV/AIDS prevention project targeting drug using members of Chicago's neighborhoods and suburbs.

Cohort 1 2003-2005

Dominick L. Frosch, PhD

As a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Frosch focused on health communication and patient participation in clinical decision-making, collaborating with faculty from the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Medicine. He completed several projects including a qualitative study of Direct-to-Consumer pharmaceutical advertising and an experiment evaluating behavioral responses to genetic screening for obesity risk. He also collaborated on projects characterizing people's general cancer information seeking and in relation to cancer news coverage.

Dr. Frosch is currently Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, appearing in journals such as Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, the Journal of General Internal Medicine and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Dr. Frosch serves as Associate Editor for the journal Health Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association, and frequently reviews papers for a variety of peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Public Health, Medical Care, JAMA and Patient Education & Counseling. His research has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Friends Research Institute.

Sonya A. Grier, PhD

Sonya A. Grier is a consumer psychologist whose research converges on topics related to the influence of social context on consumers, target marketing, the social impact of commercial marketing efforts and social marketing. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, appearing in journals such as The Journal of Marketing and Public Policy, The Journal of Marketing, Health Affairs, Annual Reviews in Public Health and The Journal of Advertising. She completed her undergraduate degree in political science at Northwestern University, spending a year as an Exchange Student at the University of Sussex in England. She received her Ph.D. in Marketing, with a minor in Social Psychology, from Northwestern University and her Master's of Business Administration Degree (MBA) from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Before becoming a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar, Dr. Grier was an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She spent two years as a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Trade Commission, where she provided consumer research expertise as part of a team examining the target marketing of violent movies, music and video games to American youth. She has also been a Visiting Scholar with the Connolly Program in Business Ethics at Georgetown University, and at the University Of Cape Town Graduate School Of Business in South Africa.

As a Health & Society Scholar, Dr. Grier's research addressed the relationship between marketing efforts, both commercial and social, and consumer health-related attitudes behaviors and outcomes. She collaborated with faculty in Epidemiology, Medicine and the Annenberg School for Communication on issues surrounding obesity, food marketing and public policy interventions. She also has a particular interest in the relationship of marketing to health disparities and the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
Starting fall 2006, Dr. Grier will be Associate Professor of Marketing at American University in Washington DC.

José A. Pagán, PhD

José A. Pagán received B.S. and M.A. degrees in mathematics and economics from The Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in economics from The University of New Mexico. Before becoming a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Penn, he was Associate Professor of Economics at The University of Texas-Pan American, focusing on labor economics.

As a Health & Society Scholar, Dr. Pagán worked with faculty from the Wharton School and others to orient his career toward health and health care. He completed major projects on the impact of health uninsurance on community health, and on the use of complementary and alternative medicine among diverse populations. After completing the Health & Society Scholars Program, he returned to The University of Texas-Pan American as Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Population Health Policy in the College of Business Administration. Dr. Pagán is also Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and Research Associate of the Population Studies Center (and the Population Aging Research Center) at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the population health consequences and community effects of uninsurance, the impact of health status on employment and productivity, and the economics of immigration and immigrant health. He has published more than 45 articles in academic journals and his research articles on the economics of health insurance coverage and access to health care have appeared in journals such as Health Affairs, Health Services Research and Health Policy. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico, a consultant for the World Bank and the Inter American Conference on Social Security, and Director of the Center for Border Economic Studies at The University of Texas-Pan American. He is currently a member of the National Advisory Committee for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, a new program that supports interdisciplinary teams of scholars to address gaps in knowledge about the relationship between nursing and the quality of care provided in hospitals.

Info on Jose's recent film project:
Cohort I Scholar José A. Pagán unveiled a short film about uninsurance in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas at the National Uninsured Latinos Conference May 21-22, 2006 at The University of Texas-Pan American. More than a third of the population in the Rio Grande Valley does not have health insurance coverage. The film presents different perspectives of what it means to be uninsured in the U.S.-Mexico border region as well as the unique challenges faced by the Rio Grande Valley's uninsured population. View Film

Cohort 8 2010-2012

Andrew Deener, PhD

Andrew Deener is an urban sociologist and community ethnographer who studies neighborhoods, culture, politics, and inequality.  He is currently completing a book, based on six years of ethnographic and historical research, about the politics of urban change in the Los Angeles coastal community of Venice.  This book examines how gentrification, homelessness, and immigration have simultaneously transformed five adjacent neighborhoods in Venice since the 1970s, and why some neighborhoods have sustained racial, ethnic, and/or socioeconomic diversity while others have become increasingly homogeneous.  As a Health and Society Scholar, Andrew will study food inequalities in the city.  He is particularly interested in examining how sustainable food sources have become integrated into urban life, the unequal distribution of these resources, and the ways in which residents of low-income neighborhoods overcome constraints in order to gain access to healthier options.  Andrew received his PhD from UCLA in 2008 and is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut.

Amy Gonzales, PhD (2010)

Amy Gonzales received her BA in psychology from UCSD in 2001. She has a MA in social psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and a MA in communication from Cornell. She is currently completing her PhD in communication from Cornell. Amy’s research examines the effect communication technology has on identity, various attitudes and well-being. She has worked with computer scientists, social scientists and physicians to explore ways to use take advantage of digital technology to promote health behaviors. In particular, she has looked at the effects of social media (e.g. texting, Facebook, blogs) on important psychological states (e.g. Facebook and self-esteem) and physical health (e.g. mobile games and adolescent eating patterns). As a Health and Society Scholar she is interested in how daily communication using digital technology influences perceptions of social support. She is particularly interested in how different cultural groups construct different norms of use depending on factors like access to technology and cultural communication patterns. She hopes to understand how technology may both contribute to and detract from social support and health in order to inform policy development on access to digital technologies. 

Cohorts:
2003-2005; 2004-2006; 2005-2007; 2006-2008; 2007-2009; 2008-2010; 2009-2011; 2010-2012; 2011-2013

Cohort 8 2010-2012

Andrew Deener, PhD

Andrew Deener is an urban sociologist and community ethnographer who studies neighborhoods, culture, politics, and inequality.  He is currently completing a book, based on six years of ethnographic and historical research, about the politics of urban change in the Los Angeles coastal community of Venice.  This book examines how gentrification, homelessness, and immigration have simultaneously transformed five adjacent neighborhoods in Venice since the 1970s, and why some neighborhoods have sustained racial, ethnic, and/or socioeconomic diversity while others have become increasingly homogeneous.  As a Health and Society Scholar, Andrew will study food inequalities in the city.  He is particularly interested in examining how sustainable food sources have become integrated into urban life, the unequal distribution of these resources, and the ways in which residents of low-income neighborhoods overcome constraints in order to gain access to healthier options.  Andrew received his PhD from UCLA in 2008 and is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut.

Amy Gonzales, PhD (2010)

Amy Gonzales received her BA in psychology from UCSD in 2001. She has a MA in social psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and a MA in communication from Cornell. She is currently completing her PhD in communication from Cornell. Amy’s research examines the effect communication technology has on identity, various attitudes and well-being. She has worked with computer scientists, social scientists and physicians to explore ways to use take advantage of digital technology to promote health behaviors. In particular, she has looked at the effects of social media (e.g. texting, Facebook, blogs) on important psychological states (e.g. Facebook and self-esteem) and physical health (e.g. mobile games and adolescent eating patterns). As a Health and Society Scholar she is interested in how daily communication using digital technology influences perceptions of social support. She is particularly interested in how different cultural groups construct different norms of use depending on factors like access to technology and cultural communication patterns. She hopes to understand how technology may both contribute to and detract from social support and health in order to inform policy development on access to digital technologies. 

Laura Tach, PhD

Laura Tach is a sociologist who studies the consequences of neighborhood inequality and housing policy for individual and collective well-being. She received her M.A. in sociology and her Ph.D. in social policy from Harvard University. Laura’s dissertation examines the social consequences of housing policies that deconcentrate poverty by replacing public housing projects with mixed-income developments. She used a variety of methods – quantitative and spatial analyses of secondary datasets, archival research on neighborhoods, and in-depth interviews with residents – to examine the social dynamics of economically integrated neighborhoods. She has also studied the causes and consequences of complex family structures. As a Health and Society Scholar, Laura will study the health effects of housing policy. In particular, she will examine the effect of urban housing policies on neighborhood health environments and resident health behaviors, and the broader implications of housing interventions for population health. In 2012, she will join the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University.

Michael Bader, PhD

Michael Bader received his B.A. in architecture and art history from Rice University and received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in the summer of 2009.  He has also been a research associate with the Built Environment and Health Project at Columbia University.  His research, including his dissertation, traces the growth and influence of emergent types of neighborhood change such as gentrification on residential preferences and how, after moving to a neighborhood, residents’ risks of obesity and levels of physical activity are associated with the residential environments of the neighborhoods where they live.  In pursuing this research, he has also developed methodological tools to characterize aspects of the physical environment at different geographic scales.  As a Health and Society Scholar, Mike will investigate the degree to which neighborhood social and economic disparities in health outcomes result from residents with similar individual-level risks moving to the same neighborhoods compared to the degree these disparities result from the shared environmental exposures experienced by residents of the same neighborhood.  Building on this research, he is also interested in examining how housing policy can be used to reduce health disparities in urban settings.

Alison Buttenheim, PhD

Alison Buttenheim is a public health researcher and social demographer who studies child health and wellbeing.  Her dissertation assessed children’s nutritional status in vulnerable communities in Asia, examining how households protect children from health and economic shocks. She has also completed several studies of marriage and reproductive health in Indonesia. Most recently, as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research, she has conducted research on social disparities in chronic disease risk in the Mexican and Mexican-American populations. As a Health & Society Scholar, Alison plans to investigate the role of parental attitudes, beliefs, and decision-making in determining child health, focusing on two outcomes in particular: vaccine refusal and childhood obesity. Using the techniques and frameworks of experimental psychology, behavioral economics, and social networks analysis, she will examine how diverse forces ranging from the media and the internet to peer norms and altruism shape the decision architecture that parents inhabit when making choices about their children’s health. Alison received her Ph.D. in Public Health at UCLA in 2007. She also holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in history from Yale University.

Jooyoung Lee is an urban ethnographer who studies race, culture, crime, and mental health in the inner-city.  His dissertation examines the careers of aspiring rappers from South Central Los Angeles.  In addition to showing how rappers organize their lives around “blowing up,” a local term for achieving stardom in the music industry, he reveals new insights into how urban youth view pathways to upward mobility.  As a Health and Society Scholar, Jooyoung will examine how street violence shapes the mental health of inner-city youth.  In particular, Jooyoung is interested in describing the everyday social situations that trigger fear and anxiety about potential street violence.  As a graduate student, Jooyoung received funding from the American Sociological Association´s Minority Fellowship Program, which is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).  Jooyoung received a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2009, and received Bachelor of Arts Degrees in Political Science and Interdisciplinary Studies from UC Berkeley in 2003.  

Sarah Gollust, PhD

Sarah Gollust received her PhD in health policy at the University of Michigan.  She is broadly interested in studying the media's influence on public opinion and public health policy, particularly with regard to health disparities and the social determinants of health.  In her dissertation work, she evaluates the impact of media coverage of type 2 diabetes on the public's support for strategies to prevent diabetes.  Her other research interests include the social and policy implications of new genetic technologies and public health ethics.

Eran Magen, PhD

Eran received his MA in education and PhD in psychology from Stanford University. His research focuses on two topics: (1) Supportive interactions - how people give and receive effective, healthy, and sustainable emotional support. (2) Temptations and self-control - why we do things that we know we are going to regret, and how to do less of them. In the rest of his life, Eran enjoys playing guitar, practicing martial arts, dancing Argentine tango, drumming, and jumping over things. http://www.EranMagen.com.

Samir Soneji, PhD

Samir Soneji received a BS in Mathematics at the University of Chicago, MA in Statistics at Columbia University, and PhD in Demography at Princeton University.  His research interests include formal demography, disability, mortality, and reproductive health.  His current work examines the relationship between the future of mortality and the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.  His other work has furthered demographic methodology in measuring healthy life expectancy and has applied this advance to assess racial and sex disparities across birth cohorts.  Samir's future work will take a broader look at disability and its consequences throughout the life course.

Samir Soneji's Home Page

Kevin Haninger, PhD

Kevin Haninger is a health economist who studies theoretical and empirical questions on the value of risks to health and life, the economic evaluation of health and medicine, and the development of quantitative methods to address ethical issues in resource allocation decisions. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Agriculture. His current projects include the development of stated preference methods to value morbidity risks and an examination of the technical and moral problems that arise when incorporating concerns for equity into cost-effectiveness analysis. As a Health and Society Scholar, Kevin seeks to strengthen the intersection between the social sciences and bioethics by exploring how empirical data on public values can inform ethical problems in health policy. He received his Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University and A.B. in Psychology from Stanford University.

Sabrina B. McCormick, PhD

Sabrina McCormick’s areas of expertise are in environmental and medical sociology, science and technology studies, social movements and development. She is primarily interested in the social contestation, politics and science that inform understandings of environmentally-induced illness. Dr. McCormick is currently completing her first book, No Family History: Finding the Environmental Links to Breast Cancer (Rowman & Littlefield), which explores the conflicts and controversies over shifting paradigms of breast cancer causation. She is directing a documentary film by the same title (www.nofamilyhistory.org) that will be released with the book. As a Health and Society Scholar, she will be studying one of the most pressing public health issues of the twenty-first century – illnesses induced by climate change. She will study the social, economic and scientific aspects, including current policies and interventions, programs funded by private corporations, and dynamics of scientific change engendered by the need to address illness outcomes. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Brown University in 2005 and has since been jointly appointed in the Department of Sociology and the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University.

Dawn Alley, PhD

Dawn Alley completed her Ph.D. in Gerontology at the University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology. Her education in gerontology prepared her to use a multidisciplinary approach and lifecourse perspective to study the complex issues surrounding aging and health. Her research focuses on ways to integrate biological and social perspectives on late-life social and ethnic health disparities in disability, frailty, and cognition. She is particularly interested in using biomarkers to understand variation in health trajectories among older people. In her dissertation, she examined socioeconomic differences in biomarkers of inflammation and the relationships between inflammation and cognitive decline. As a Health and Society Scholar, she plans to continue and expand this research by exploring the ways in which inflammation mediates the relationships between infectious and chronic disease. She is also interested in working to integrate psychological and biologic al perspectives on stress in aging and in studying the relationship between early life experiences and health trajectories later in life.

James Macinko, PhD

James Macinko is a health services researcher focusing on primary health care. Since 2003 he has worked as assistant professor of public health at New York University. His research focuses on measuring the impact of health reforms and policy changes, developing tools to evaluate primary care performance, and exploring the broader role of health systems and services in the production and potential reduction of global health disparities. As a Health and Society Scholar he hopes to explore the impact of access to appropriate care over the life course on the emergence and widening of racial/ethnic and SES-related health differentials, document perceptions of health providers and payers of the causes of health inequalities, and explore how global comparisons can enhance our knowledge of the determinants of health inequalities in the United States. Over the course of his career, Dr. Macinko hopes to bring a more global and population health-oriented perspective to health services research.

Vida Maralani, PhD

Vida Maralani studies educational inequality and social stratification. She studies both the mechanisms that create educational inequality and the effect of educational inequality on other aspects of social inequality such as the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status. For example, her dissertation estimates the effects of increases in women’s education on the education of the next generation. She shows how intergenerational effects work both through individual level processes, and also through changes in family size and family structure that have compositional effects at the population level. As a Health and Society Scholar, Vida will investigate the mechanisms that relate educational inequality and health disparities. She is interested in how race/ethnic differences in the effects of education on health may widen or shrink health disparities between groups. She’s also interested in understanding the relationship between educational trajectories and health trajectories in adolescence and early adulthood. Vida holds a MA in history and in sociology, and will complete a Ph.D. in sociology in July 2006 at UCLA. She has also worked as a public policy analyst in the fields of education, youth and poverty.

Cohort 3 2005-2007

Carolyn C. Cannuscio, ScD

Carolyn Cannuscio is a social epidemiologist by training, a chronic disease epidemiologist in practice, and a teacher/learner at heart. During her undergraduate education in a Health and Society program at Brown University, Dr. Cannuscio caught the epidemiology bug through exposure to classes that examined environment, behavior, and disease. These classes ignited her interest in the determinants of health and illness, especially in an aging population. To follow that interest, she pursued formal social epidemiology training at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she worked with the Nurses’ Health and Health Professionals Studies investigators to examine the health effects of women’s employment status, social ties, and caregiving responsibilities. After completing her doctoral training at Harvard, Dr. Cannuscio shifted gears and conducted health outcomes and epidemiology research at Merck, where she first developed health promotion programs for elderly managed care enrollees. Her later research examined determinants of cardiovascular risk, with a focus on the widely used COX-2 inhibitors. Her collaborative research on Vioxx contributed evidence of increased heart attack risk in users of that drug, which was removed from the market in the fall of 2004.During her tenure as an RWJ Health and Society Scholar, Dr. Cannuscio plans to examine social factors that promote lifelong health and vital involvement in an aging population. She is particularly interested in community development strategies, housing options, and policy initiatives that foster health, sustain high functional status, and enrich quality of life for families--and especially for elders. She has a particular interest in intergenerational exchange and social/civic engagement throughout the life course. Over the course of her career, Dr. Cannuscio hopes to build the field of population health by engaging undergraduates and cultivating their interest in the profound influence of social forces on health outcomes.

David T. Grande, MD, MPA

David Grande is a general internist and recently completed a Masters in Public Affairs (MPA) at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He completed his residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 2003 and graduated from the Ohio State University College of Medicine in 1999. Prior to residency, he served a full-time, one-year term as president of the American Medical Student Association working in their Washington-area office on issues related to access to health care and health disparities. He recently worked on behalf of the City of Philadelphia Department of Public Health to develop a plan to improve access to services and overall public health in response to a voter-initiated city charter change. As a Health and Society Scholar, he is studying the relationship between health systems and local communities and the determinants and consequences of variations in trust. He is also exploring issues pertaining to medical professionalism

Annice E. Kim, PhD, MPH

Annice Kim received her Ph.D. in Health Behavior & Health Education from the University of North Carolina School of Public Health. Her primary research interest is to understand the impact of media and technology on health and society, and to develop innovative applications and policies that utilize new media to improve population health. Her dissertation examined the sales and marketing practices of Internet cigarette vendors, factors motivating smokers to purchase cigarettes online, and legislative attempts to regulate online cigarette sales. Her dissertation work was funded with competitive grants from the Association of Schools of Public Health and the RWJ Substance Abuse Policy Research Program. As a Health & Society Scholar, she is examining the role of media and communication in improving population health. One of her projects examines the coverage of racial health disparities in newspaper media, how attributions of responsibility for causes and solutions for racial health disparities have been framed, and whether framing varies by diversity of newspaper staff and their media markets. She earned her M.P.H. in epidemiology from Boston University School of Public Health, and her B.A. in molecular and cell biology, with a minor in philosophy from University of California, Berkeley.

Elizabeth M. Wildsmith, PhD

Elizabeth Wildsmith received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in December of 2004. While there she developed a strong interest in several areas of social demography, including the complex relationships that exist between social context, the family, individual level disadvantage, and individual well-being. Her dissertation, titled "Non-Marital among Mexican American Women: Exploring the Role of Social Context", looked at race/ethnic differences in the transition to adulthood. Building on this work, she plans to focus more closely on how social and family contexts are defined and measured, which contexts are relevant for whom, and which mechanisms link these contexts to individual well-being. She is interested in how social and family contexts may increase exposure to, or offer protection from, risk factors associated with negative health outcomes. She has also returned to her earlier interest in teenage fertility and is working on projects which look both at the causes and consequences of teenage and nonmarital fertility. With collaborators at Penn she is 1) exploring the role pre-teen literacy and reading skill has on teenage childbearing and 2) examining how recent changes in teenage and nonmarital fertility have impacted the wellbeing of women and children. She continues to be particularly interested in whether Mexican American women are affected in similar ways as Black women by their minority status within the United States, or whether a distinct ethnic heritage and/or ethnic experience independently affects their well-being.

Cohort 2 2004-2006

Patrick M. Krueger, PhD

Patrick M. Krueger is a sociologist who studies the social stratification of health, with a particular focus on understanding the mechanisms that lead to race/ethnic, sex, and class disparities in health over the life-course. Specifically, he examines how individuals convert social, cultural, and economic resources into health through health promoting behaviors; how family and neighborhood dynamics shape health and mortality outcomes; and how intra-individual factors shape orientations toward health and health trajectories over time. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Colorado and his B.A. in sociology and psychology from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI.

Chyvette T. Williams, PhD

Chyvette T. Williams holds an MPH degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and PhD in Social and Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Health Policy and Management from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For the past nine years, Dr. Williams has been involved in HIV and drug abuse research, both domestically and internationally. She was awarded funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to complete her dissertation -a multilevel study examining the effects of neighborhood disadvantage and personal networks on patterns of drug use among inner-city drug users. Her primary research interests are in urban and minority health, social problems (e.g. substance use, poverty, and crime), and in the effects of social networks and supports on health risks. As an RWJ Health and Society Scholar, Dr. Williams conducted research that examined health behaviors in context and explored innovative approaches to addressing urban social problems. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Health Policy and Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. Additionally, she is the Associate Director for the Community Outreach Intervention Project, an HIV/AIDS prevention project targeting drug using members of Chicago's neighborhoods and suburbs.

Cohort 1 2003-2005

Dominick L. Frosch, PhD

As a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Frosch focused on health communication and patient participation in clinical decision-making, collaborating with faculty from the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Medicine. He completed several projects including a qualitative study of Direct-to-Consumer pharmaceutical advertising and an experiment evaluating behavioral responses to genetic screening for obesity risk. He also collaborated on projects characterizing people's general cancer information seeking and in relation to cancer news coverage.

Dr. Frosch is currently Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine & Health Services Research in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, appearing in journals such as Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, the Journal of General Internal Medicine and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Dr. Frosch serves as Associate Editor for the journal Health Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association, and frequently reviews papers for a variety of peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Public Health, Medical Care, JAMA and Patient Education & Counseling. His research has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Friends Research Institute.

Sonya A. Grier, PhD

Sonya A. Grier is a consumer psychologist whose research converges on topics related to the influence of social context on consumers, target marketing, the social impact of commercial marketing efforts and social marketing. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles, appearing in journals such as The Journal of Marketing and Public Policy, The Journal of Marketing, Health Affairs, Annual Reviews in Public Health and The Journal of Advertising. She completed her undergraduate degree in political science at Northwestern University, spending a year as an Exchange Student at the University of Sussex in England. She received her Ph.D. in Marketing, with a minor in Social Psychology, from Northwestern University and her Master's of Business Administration Degree (MBA) from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Before becoming a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar, Dr. Grier was an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She spent two years as a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Trade Commission, where she provided consumer research expertise as part of a team examining the target marketing of violent movies, music and video games to American youth. She has also been a Visiting Scholar with the Connolly Program in Business Ethics at Georgetown University, and at the University Of Cape Town Graduate School Of Business in South Africa.

As a Health & Society Scholar, Dr. Grier's research addressed the relationship between marketing efforts, both commercial and social, and consumer health-related attitudes behaviors and outcomes. She collaborated with faculty in Epidemiology, Medicine and the Annenberg School for Communication on issues surrounding obesity, food marketing and public policy interventions. She also has a particular interest in the relationship of marketing to health disparities and the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
Starting fall 2006, Dr. Grier will be Associate Professor of Marketing at American University in Washington DC.

José A. Pagán, PhD

José A. Pagán received B.S. and M.A. degrees in mathematics and economics from The Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. in economics from The University of New Mexico. Before becoming a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at Penn, he was Associate Professor of Economics at The University of Texas-Pan American, focusing on labor economics.

As a Health & Society Scholar, Dr. Pagán worked with faculty from the Wharton School and others to orient his career toward health and health care. He completed major projects on the impact of health uninsurance on community health, and on the use of complementary and alternative medicine among diverse populations. After completing the Health & Society Scholars Program, he returned to The University of Texas-Pan American as Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Population Health Policy in the College of Business Administration. Dr. Pagán is also Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and Research Associate of the Population Studies Center (and the Population Aging Research Center) at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the population health consequences and community effects of uninsurance, the impact of health status on employment and productivity, and the economics of immigration and immigrant health. He has published more than 45 articles in academic journals and his research articles on the economics of health insurance coverage and access to health care have appeared in journals such as Health Affairs, Health Services Research and Health Policy. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico, a consultant for the World Bank and the Inter American Conference on Social Security, and Director of the Center for Border Economic Studies at The University of Texas-Pan American. He is currently a member of the National Advisory Committee for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative, a new program that supports interdisciplinary teams of scholars to address gaps in knowledge about the relationship between nursing and the quality of care provided in hospitals.

Info on Jose's recent film project:
Cohort I Scholar José A. Pagán unveiled a short film about uninsurance in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas at the National Uninsured Latinos Conference May 21-22, 2006 at The University of Texas-Pan American. More than a third of the population in the Rio Grande Valley does not have health insurance coverage. The film presents different perspectives of what it means to be uninsured in the U.S.-Mexico border region as well as the unique challenges faced by the Rio Grande Valley's uninsured population. View Film