Speaker Series

Alex Ezeh is Dornsife Professor of Global Health at the Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University.  Dr. Ezeh’s work focuses on urban health, population change, and models to strengthen knowledge-based institutions. Previously, he served as the founding Executive Director of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) and led APHRC to become one of ... Read more

Dr. Leigh Senderowicz is a public health researcher and feminist social demographer. Her mixed-methods research focuses on contraceptive autonomy, exploring the ways that new approaches to measurement and evaluation can promote person-centered care, health equity and reproductive freedom.

Abstract:While qualitative research presents obvious strengths for critical population studies, quantification is also essential to critical social science’s emancipatory aim. In this talk, I take feminist critiques of demography and public health seriously, to demonstrate how we can include social structure, better model distributions and heterogeneity, and use critical theory to shape research questions, within ... Read more

Abstract: Flows of international migration are needed around the world to understand the patterns and corresponding effects on demographic, social and economic change across sending and receiving countries. A major challenge to this understanding is that nearly all of the countries in the world do not gather or produce reliable statistics on flows of international migration. ... Read more

Title: When All Health Politics Was Local Abstract: This talk argues that one cannot understand the origins of health problems — and the success of solutions to address them — without analyzing the local context that surrounds them. We’ll examine battles over pollution caused by industrial giants, coal extractors and fights over the unequal distribution of medical care in major cities via ... Read more

Abstract: An extensive literature documents large and persistent declines in earnings following job loss. We comprehensively study the role of the public safety net in mitigating lost income from no fault job loss using the 1996-2013 Survey of Income and Program Participation. With an individual fixed effects model, we document which public programs provide the most ... Read more

Abstract: Mass incarceration is a system of social and racial control in the United States that arrests, convicts, incarcerates, and supervises racial and ethnic minority populations through probation and parole. Mass incarceration affects those who are incarcerated and under community supervision, as well as the families and communities where it is concentrated, and is a pervasive cause ... Read more

Abstract: The immediate, direct effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality are felt worldwide. Yet this is not the only mortality crisis the world has witnessed in recent decades. In the US, theopioid epidemic, increased automobile deaths and homicides, and, more generally, the midlifemortality crisis all contribute to the deteriorating average lifespan of Americans today. ... Read more

Abstract: Women and men across the globe are at high risk of underachieving their fertility goals. This means that they are aging out of their reproductive years having had fewer children than they desired to have, a phenomenon referred to as unrealized fertility. Although often considered a problem concentrated in low-fertility settings, recent research has revealed ... Read more

Bio: Kathleen Cagney, Ph.D., is Director of the Institute for Social Research and Professor of Sociology. Her work examines social inequality and its relationship to health with a focus on neighborhood, race, and aging and the life course. Her general aim is to bring insights from urban sociological theory and methods to research on health. ... Read more

Abstract: Universal public health insurance is being implemented across the globe putting substantial pressure on public finances. Whereas the impact of these programs on health care utilization has been well documented, there is limited evidence on the causal impacts on population health. This study contributes to filling this important gap by exploiting the roll-out of ... Read more

Abstract:  Economic inequality is an important issue in the world today, and the difficulty in reducing it has led many to presume it is an intrinsic property of human systems. Archaeologists have been increasingly vocal in countering this idea, pointing out cases in history where economic inequality has decreased or remained low over long periods. However, ... Read more

Abstract: Exposure to violence and trauma in Latin America significantly contributes to migration to the U.S., bringing attention to the mental health consequences of forced migration at the U.S./Mexico border. Traumatic events occur at every stage of migration and negatively impact mental health. Although studies such as Keller et. al. look at pre-migration experiences of ... Read more

Abstract: Medicaid data are used frequently to investigate racial and ethnic disparities in health. However, there is considerable variation in the completeness of race/ethnicity information in Medicaid data across the United States (U.S.). To address these gaps, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Enhancing Health Data (EHealth) Program assessed the feasibility, benefit, and effectiveness of linking Medicaid enrollment ... Read more