SCHOLARS

Current Scholars

Magdalena Cerdá - Magdalena Cerdá is a social epidemiologist who received a DrPH from Harvard School of Public Health in 2006. She is currently investigating the ways in which neighborhood social environments help to control youth violence in Colombia and the United States. She is also examining how residential context explains the spatial distribution of age-related disparities in health, specifically testing the influence of neighborhoods on the divergent association between maternal age and birth weight found across Chicago. Related prior research includes a study of the influences of family and neighborhood on delinquency and substance use across Hispanic immigrant generations, and an investigation of ways that neighborhood social and economic features modify the effects of individual developmental assets on youth violence trajectories. Before attending Harvard, Magdalena worked at the World Health Organization, where she advised countries such as Mozambique on the development of national policies on violence prevention, developed global guidelines for collecting forensic evidence in sexual violence cases, and co-authored the youth violence chapter of the World Report on Violence and Health. As a Health & Society Scholar, she plans to bring together the fields of social and developmental epidemiology in order to understand how family, school and neighborhood characteristics can modify the likelihood that youth will transition over time into increasingly severe delinquent behaviors.

Jennifer Beam Dowd - Jennifer Beam Dowd received her PhD from Princeton University in August 2004, where she specialized in Economics and Demography, with a focus on socioeconomic inequalities in health. Her dissertation tested several mechanisms linking economic status and health outcomes, including the role of maternal health behaviors during pregnancy in explaining childhood health inequalities, as well as the role of biological markers of stress in explaining educational and income gradients in older adults. She recently worked as a Health Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, DC on issues regarding children’s health insurance and Medicaid availability for persons with mental illness. As a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar, Jenn hopes to integrate biological and social science data to pinpoint how income and education get under the skin.   Her current work examines the relationship between education, income, and antibody response to latent infection as a marker of stress and immune function, and how immunity may mediate the relationship between socioeconomic status and chronic disease outcomes.  Prior to her graduate work, Jenn received a BA in Politics and Spanish from Washington and Lee University and served as a Luce Scholar at the Rural Development Foundation in East Java, Indonesia. http://sitemaker.umich.edu/jenndowd

Malo Andre Hutson - Malo Hutson earned his PhD in 2006 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning where he was a member of the Housing, Community, and Economic Development Research Group. He earned his BA in Sociology and a Masters in City and Regional Planning both from the University of California at Berkeley. Malo’s research interests include regional planning, economic and workforce development, urban policy and politics, and community health. His current research examines the economic link between medical clusters in metropolitan areas and economically disadvantaged and minority communities. His dissertation investigated the employment opportunities that exist for urban residents within Boston’s health care industry. Malo has extensive research experience in regional, community, and economic development and he has managed several research projects throughout the U.S. and Canada. As a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar, Malo plans to examine how race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, neighborhood characteristics, and geography influence the health outcomes of urban populations. He also has an interest in understanding the role of new and emerging technologies and how they affect the work of health care professionals and the health outcomes of patients. Upon completing his fellowship as a Health & Society Scholar, Dr. Hutson has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley.

[ back to top ]

---

RWJ HSSP Scholars 2007-2009

Amar A. Hamoudi- Amar Hamoudi completed his PhD in the Department of Economics at UCLA in 2007. His dissertation research focused on the ways that families organize their living arrangements. The central chapter of the dissertation explored the relationship between living arrangements and economic preferences. It reports empirical patterns which would be predicted by an economic model in which one of the factors affecting the family’s living arrangements is its motivation to diversify spatially-defined economic risk, but in which the family’s ability to share risk is constrained by each member’s incentives to play his or her appointed role in any risk sharing scheme. In the process of completing his dissertation, Amar was involved in the design and implementation of a pilot study aimed at measuring several domains of economic preferences in a population-representative sample of two Mexican states. As a Health & Society Scholar, Amar intends to explore the relationship between these types of preferences and health related behaviors—for example, does financial risk aversion, or economic forward-lookingness, relate to individuals’ investments in their own or their children’s health? In addition, he hopes to explore some of the biological correlates of these preferences, in order to shed light on both the process of preference formation and on some of the relationships between economic and health outcomes. Prior to his doctoral studies, Amar completed a Masters’ Degree in International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he was involved in data collection and analysis in a cost-effectiveness study of Botswana’s national HIV treatment program.

Briana Mezuk- Briana Mezuk received her PhD in Mental Health from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2007. She completed dual-degrees in Neuroscience, and History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2002. In 2004/5, she was the Project Coordinator for the Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study 23-year follow-up, where she became interested in the social, physiological, and behavioral factors that impact mental health and disorders over the lifespan. Her dissertation research examines the physiologic mediators of co-occurring mental and physical health conditions, with a focus on depression and disorders of metabolism, including osteoporosis. She is particularly interested in understanding the factors that influence the consequences of psychopathology as they relate to physical health outcomes and how those relationships change over the life course. As a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar, Briana aims to build on her work examining the mediators and moderators linking mental and physical health over the life course by adopting multilevel approaches – “neurons to neighborhoods” – to studying these relationships. She will also work on developing evidence-based intervention strategies to interrupt the physiologic processes that underlie co-occurring mental and physical health conditions.

Richard Pilsner- Rick Pilsner received his PhD in Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in 2007. His dissertation investigates the interplay of inorganic arsenic exposure and folate nutritional status on genomic DNA methylation in adults residing in Bangladesh. Epigenetic events represent important mechanisms by which reversible heritable changes in gene function occur without change in DNA sequence, mainly through alterations in DNA methylation and histone modifications. Many cancers and other adverse health outcomes have been linked to underlying epigenetic mechanisms. As a Health & Society Scholar, Richard plans on investigating how aberrations in epigenetic markers are influenced by the interaction between environmental exposures and nutrition/social/other demographic indicators. He aims to bridge the gaps between these indicators by combining epigenetic research and molecular epidemiology to further the field of population health epigenomics. Rick holds a Masters degree in Public Health from Columbia University, where in 2001, he was awarded a two year EPA STAR fellowship to study the effects of manganese exposure on mitochondrial respiration and iron homeostasis.

 

[ back to top ]

RWJ HSSP Scholars 2008-2010

 

Cleopatra Abdou - Cleopatra Abdou will receive her PhD in social health psychology, with a minor in quantitative psychology, from UCLA in 2008. She integrates principles and methodologies from the areas of social psychology, stress physiology, and health disparities from a cross-cultural perspective to investigate mechanisms whereby culture and social identities impact healthcare decision-making and health outcomes among minority women and their children across the socioeconomic strata. Her specialized interests are in maternal-child health and in the impact of social identity threat on health-related decisions. She examines four core questions in these two related areas of research: 1) what are the intrapersonal and interpersonal processes whereby social identities, like ethnicity and social class, translate into health? 2) what are the cultural bases of behavior that impact healthcare decisions? 3) how do social identities and cultural beliefs interact to shape stress exposure and the availability of coping resources? and 4) what features of culture promote being healthy and living well? Abdou’s research, largely community-based participatory research, has identified sociocultural mechanisms that bridge ethnic and socioeconomic differences in health and well-being via direct, moderated, and mediated pathways. Her research also examines broader theoretical and measurement issues surrounding the study of culture, socioeconomic status, and health in different ethnic groups.

 

Whitney Robinson - Whitney Robinson will receive her PhD in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008. Her dissertation explores reasons why obesity prevalence is much greater in young U.S. Black women than in young U.S. Black men. Specifically, her research investigates to what extent adolescent behaviors and family demographics are associated with this gender disparity. As a Health & Society Scholar, Whitney intends to estimate causal associations between obesity and various health outcomes. As part of this research, she will control for residual confounding factors, such as “healthy-user bias” and multiple dimensions of socioeconomic position, that may have affected estimates from previous studies. Whitney also holds a master’s degree in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she researched the association between early-life body size and rate of prostate cancer later in life.

 

Christopher Wildeman - Christopher Wildeman is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health at the University of Michigan. He is also a Postdoctoral Affiliate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in Sociology and Demography from Princeton University in 2008. Christopher's dissertation, which was funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, considered the consequences of mass imprisonment for inequality among American children. The first empirical chapter of his dissertation, which estimates the risk of parental imprisonment for the 1978 and 1990 birth cohorts of American children, won the Dorothy S. Thomas Award from the Population Association of America in 2008 and multiple awards from sections of the American Sociological Association in 2007. This chapter of his dissertation was published in Demography. Subsequent chapters considered the influence of paternal incarceration on children's aggressive behaviors using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and the influence of imprisonment rates on infant mortality rates in the United States between 1990 and 2004. In addition, Christopher is interested in the connections between religion and family life in contemporary American society and has published a paper on employment trajectories of new fathers using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study.

As a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar, Christopher plans to continue researching the consequences of mass imprisonment for the health and well-being of American children and adults. He also plans to consider racial and ethnic differences in the benefits of marriage in collaboration with Kristen Harknett and Wendy Cadge. http://sitemaker.umich.edu/christopherwildeman/home

 

[ back to top ]