CDE is excited to welcome five new assistant professors to campus in fall 2019 who will expand the depth and breadth of our scholarship. Megan Bea joins UW’s School of Human Ecology after receiving a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University. Her research interests are in economic sociology, sociology of finance, social stratification, and financial policy. Mosi Ifatunji comes to the Department of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His primary research and teaching interests are in racial and ethnic theory and the methods used to study inequality and stratification. Rebecca Myerson joins UW’s Population Health Sciences department where she studies the impacts of policies on incidence and management of chronic diseases. Rebecca was formerly affiliated with the University of Southern California. Jessica Pac received her PhD from Columbia University and joins UW’s School of Social Work. Her primary research interests include poverty and income inequality – especially as cause and consequence of child maltreatment – and health economics, namely, the early-childhood determinants of adult health and human capital. Lauren Schmitz of the La Follette School of Public Affairs utilizes social, genomic, and epigenomic data from population-based longitudinal studies to examine how inequalities in the social environment shape disparities in health and socioeconomic attainment across the life course. Lauren was most recently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
We are pleased to have five new postdocs affiliated with CDE: Kierra Sattler, Leigh Senderowicz and Vivian Tamkin are new to the Health Disparities Research Scholars program (HDRS), headed by CDE affiliate Deborah Ehrenthal. Also, Joseph Clark and Wei Xu are new postdocs with the Center for Demography of Health and Aging (CDHA), working with Jason Fletcher.
We also welcomed nine new students to the demography training program this fall, including five first-year PhD students in Sociology – Lindsay Cannon, Emma Romell, Grace Venechuk, Ang Yu and Boyan Zheng, as well as four students in later years of their PhD programs in other disciplines – Vikas Gawai (Agricultural and Applied Economics), Minsun Jang (Agricultural and Applied Economics), David Mallinson (Population Health Sciences), and Hans Schwarz (Economics).
We are glad to have all of these new faces who bring new energy and ideas to our research and training community!