Welcome to John Eason (sociology), CDE’s newest faculty affiliate. Eason came to Madison from Texas A&M, where he was an associate professor of sociology. In his research, Eason challenges existing models and develops new theories of community, health, race, punishment, and rural/urban processes. In 2017, he published Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation (University of Chicago Press), which presented a new conceptual model of rural neighborhoods and explored the placement of prisons and the impact on local economies.
CDE also welcomes four new postdoctoral researchers Efrat Herzberg-Druker (Fulbright), Yongnam Kim (CDE), Katie Jajtner (NIA T32 trainee), and Sherry Zhang (Health Disparities Research Scholar). Herzberg-Druker completed her PhD in labor studies at Tel Aviv University in 2018. Her dissertation examined how demographic changes in family patterns affect rising income inequality. Kim obtained a PhD in educational psychology from UW–Madison in 2018. His research interest is in causal inference using randomized and non-randomized studies. Jajtner, an economist, competed her doctoral work at Fordham University with a dissertation on inequality and disability. Zhang received her PhD in policy analysis and management from Cornell in 2018. She works in the areas of family demography, race and ethnicity, the transition to adulthood, health, and inequality.
Nine doctoral students have joined CDE this year. Five first-year students from sociology—Leah Foltman, Shiro Furuya, Anita Li, Samira Payne, and Fumiya Uchikoshi—have begun their studies in population research at CDE. Four continuing students, Joanna Venator (fourth-year, economics), Jason Robey (second-year, sociology), Elizabeth Holzhausen (fourth-year, epidemiology), and Renee Kramer (third-year, population health sciences) have also joined the program. Welcome, all!