Seed Grants
2025-2026 Seed Grant Awardees
Awardee: Tiwaladeoluwa B. Adekunle, Assistant Professor of Reproductive and Population
Description: People with disabilities face disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, being 11 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related conditions than their non-disabled peers. While the causes are complex, critical gaps in communication and shared decision-making between patients and clinicians play a significant role.
Electronic patient portals have emerged as a vital tool for improving these outcomes by fostering transparent information sharing and active patient participation. However, to date, no research has examined how people with disabilities access and use these portals during the critical perinatal period. Using a mixed-methods design, the research team will integrate secondary data analysis with in-depth interviews. The study goal is to capture population-level trends while documenting the lived experiences of portal use, ultimately identifying the barriers and facilitators to engagement for this subgroup of the population.
Awardees: Megan Doherty Bea, Associate Professor of Consumer Science, and Max Besbris, Associate Professor of Sociology
Description: Recent national estimates indicate that 21 percent of U.S. households were financially impacted by disasters and severe storms in 2022. These burdens are not distributed equally: Black and Hispanic households disproportionately suffer from associated income losses, work disruptions, and relocation costs.
While existing research has documented the immediate financial costs of disasters across lines of race, class, and geography, few studies have utilized a life-course approach to understand longer-term consequences. This leaves a significant gap in our understanding of how the timing of disaster exposure impacts financial wellbeing. Against a backdrop of increasing economic precarity and more frequent extreme weather events, this project seeks to evaluate how disasters reshape financial trajectories over the life course and identify policy interventions to mitigate these inequalities.
Awardees: Allison Daminger, Assistant Professor of Sociology, and Christine Schwartz, Professor of Sociology
Description: In the United States, marriage rates have declined significantly since 1990, and the total fertility rate reached an all-time low in 2024. These trends have sparked concern about population decline and family stability. While demographers have long studied how values influence these shifts, little attention has been paid to “heteropessimism”—a concept gaining traction in popular media.
Heteropessimism refers to a disillusionment with heterosexual relationships, often stemming from gender polarization, frustration with inequalities in partnerships, or a sense of disadvantage. This disillusionment may drive a reluctance to form lasting romantic or co-parenting partnerships. Despite popular fascination with this narrative, there is currently no empirical evidence regarding its prevalence or its actual impact on fertility. This project aims to design and pilot a survey instrument to assess individuals’ attitudes toward heterosexual partnership. This effort will lay the essential groundwork for a future nationally representative survey linking these attitudes to family dynamics.
Awardee: Gisella Kagy, Assistant Professor of Consumer Science
Description: Ghana faces a critical shortage of imaging specialists, with only three radiologists per million people—far below the international recommendation of 100 per million. This scarcity creates significant bottlenecks in patient care, leading to long delays and adverse health outcomes.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a transformative solution to this gap in health provision by augmenting the capabilities of the limited workforce. While AI has demonstrated high accuracy in diagnostic settings, its real-world implementation in resource-limited environments remains largely unexplored. This study evaluates the impact of integrating a multimodal AI diagnostic support tool within Ghana’s healthcare system. Developed by minoHealth AI Labs, this tool analyzes radiology images and medical records to generate diagnostic recommendations and draft reports. By assessing this emerging technology in a clinical setting, this research aims to determine how AI can enhance the speed and accuracy of diagnosis, ultimately reducing global health disparities.
Description: The United States, like many high-income nations, is experiencing a sustained decline in fertility rates—a trend with significant economic and demographic consequences. While some experts attribute this to economic insecurity, others point to shifting social values. This project advances the debate by applying the concept of “deinstitutionalization” to fertility.
Originally used to explain changes in marriage, deinstitutionalization describes a shift from clear, shared social expectations to a landscape of individual choice and flexibility. This study addresses the questions: Has childbearing followed a similar path? Is having children no longer viewed as a defining marker of adulthood, but rather as an optional, individualized preference?
To answer these foundational questions, we must measure social norms accurately—a persistent challenge in demographic research. Moving beyond standard surveys that rely on personal attitudes or observed behaviors, this project employs an innovative factorial experimental design to map the strength and character of contemporary fertility norms in the U.S.
2024-2025 Seed Grant Awardees
Awardee: Priya Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Agricultural & Applied Economics
Description: Designing appropriate social safety nets to protect the vulnerable in urban areas is crucial to safeguarding their welfare, and timing is critical considering rapid urbanization and the increasing risks posed both by pandemics as well as climate change. The goal of this project is to be a first step in setting up a survey that would follow households over time and collect information of both wellbeing and the shocks they face, to inform policy action. The full-scale study will cover over 7,000 households (about 20,000-30,000 households) across the informal settlements in Delhi – the largest urban area in the world after Tokyo, and the fastest growing city with ballooning informal settlements.
Awardee: Laura Swan, Senior Research Scientist, Reproductive Equity Action Lab
Description: Across U.S. history, social norms, governmental policies, and public health programs have promoted the reproduction of some groups, such as affluent cisgender white women, and restricted that of others, such as poor women and women of color. Furthermore, qualitative research has documented patient and provider accounts of healthcare providers explicitly and implicitly promoting certain birth control methods and discouraging others, with these practices occurring differentially based on provider biases and patient demographic characteristics. Despite growing concerns over coercion in contraceptive care, including criticisms of LARC-first contraceptive counseling, which prioritizes long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) over other methods, few studies have described the frequency and manifestations of provider-based contraceptive coercion, and there is no established method of measuring this construct. To address these knowledge gaps, this research aims to document experiences of contraceptive coercion and highlight ways that contraceptive care can better promote reproductive autonomy.
Awardee: Malia Jones, Assistant Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology
Description: During the COVID-19 pandemic, rural places in the United States fared worse than suburban and urban places in terms of death rates per capita. Previous work has focused on COVID-19 death rates within each county, finding that age is an important predictor of mortality rates, but far from the only predictor. Here, we ask if the degree of daily commuting between counties explains variation in the COVID-19 case and death rates during the Delta-Omicron phase of the pandemic, roughly July 2021 – March 2022. Further, we investigate the age- and sex-specific death rates in this time period to identify whether there was rural penalty in mortality among working-aged people, specifically parents of school-aged children.
Using publicly available data, we construct a county-level data set which includes commuter flows between all counties in the United States, demographic data, age- and sex-specific all-cause mortality, and daily COVID-19 case and death rates. We identify the degree to which connectedness explains age- and sex-specific death rates using a multilevel modeling approach, and identify spatial clusters of high mortality rates among parent-aged people. Identifying the role of commuter flows is an important step toward more accurate, locally tuned models of infectious disease spread and represents an important methodological and theoretical advance in our understanding of the social determinants of infectious disease.