July 4, 2009

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New Faces at OPR

We welcome the following new OPR faculty, visiting scholars, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students.

Faculty

Taryn Dinkelman is a new Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. Her research is concerned with the provision of public infrastructure and health services in developing countries. Her dissertation research examined how rural electrification in South Africa affected women’s market employment through the channel of reduced workload in the home. She has also studied the effects of minimum wage laws on the domestic service sector in South Africa, and with David Lam (University of Michigan) and Murray Leibbrandt (University of Cape Town), she has worked on the effects of economic shocks on the risky sexual behavior of young adults in South Africa. Her most recent work uses the Cape Area Panel Study to analyze the human capital accumulation trajectories of young adults who are born during resource-constrained drought periods. Taryn received her Ph.D.in Economics at the University of Michigan in 2008. She also received an M.Com. in Economics from the University of the Witwaterstrand, South Africa in 2002, and she completed her B.A. in Economics, Politics, and Journalism at Rhodes University, South Africa, in 1998. Her fields of interest are in development and labor economics, economic demography, and applied econometrics.

Ana Maria Goldani holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, 1989, and an M.A. in Demography from El Colegio de Mexico, 1976. Before joining Princeton as an Associate Research Scholar in Sociology, she was an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Visiting Professor in the Master’s Program in Population Studies and Social Research, National School of Statistical Sciences (ENCE) of the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in Rio de Janeiro. She was a professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Sao Paulo, Brazil where she taught and had other professional activities, including being a founding member of PAGU (The Center for Research on Gender Relations), a Researcher at NEPO (Population Studies Center) and the Director of the Doctoral Programs: in Family and Gender, as well as in Demography. Ana Maria’s numerous national and international activities include General Secretary of the Brazilian Population Association (ABEP), member of the Committee on Comparative Fertility of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), and Visiting Professor at the Center of Demographic and Urban Studies at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City and at the Open University of Lisbon in Portugal. Her research interests include family, demography, sex and gender.

Edward Telles has joined the Department of Sociology as Professor of Sociology. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas-Austin in 1988. He earned his M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA in 1984 and his B.A. in Anthropology from Stanford in 1978. Prior to joining Princeton, he was Professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1988, although he took a leave of absence to be a program officer in human rights at the Ford Foundation in Rio de Janeiro from 1997 to 2000. His research interests are in race and ethnicity, social demography, development, urban sociology. His book Race in Another America received the Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award from the Population Section of the same association.

Visiting Scholars

Ron Brookmeyer is Visiting Research Scholar in the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing. Ron is Professor of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research, which is at the interface of biostatistics, epidemiology and public health, uses the tools of statistical science and epidemiology to address and measure global public health problems such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, biosecurity threats, and the health challenges of aging populations including Alzheimer's disease. He is currently collaborating with the CDC on new estimates of HIV incidence in the U.S, and he chaired the international advisory panel to UNAIDS/WHO that reviewed the latest global HIV/AIDS statistics. Ron's work on biosecurity threats such as anthrax has led to his recent appointment to the National Biosurveillance Advisory Committee to the Director of the CDC. Ron is a member of the Institute of Medicine and served as chair of the Statistics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ron will also be teaching Epidemiology in the Spring semester.

Barbara Cooper is visiting OPR this year on a Mellon New Directions fellowship. She is a Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, where she teaches African history; she is also the Director of Rutgers’ Center for African Studies. Her research interests include African social history, family life, infant mortality, and family planning. Her previous research has focused on the history of family, religion, and culture in Niger. Her publications include Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989 (Heinemann, 1989) and Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel (Indiana University Press, 2006). Her current research is on the history of debates about population and fertility in the Sahel over the course of the 20th century. She will be taking courses through OPR this year in preparation for research on that project.

Marika Dunn, a doctoral candidate in Political Science from Rutgers University, is collaborating with Kathy Fennelly (Visiting Senior Research Scholar) on data analysis from the New Immigrant Destinations pilot study in North Carolina. Her research interests are in political participation and representation; race, ethnicity, and immigration; civil liberties and civil rights. Currently, Marika holds a Harold and Reba Martin Fellowship, Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, and she works on programs for the N.J. Center for Civic and Law-Related Education. Prior to this, she was a program associate for the American Association of University Women Legal Advocacy Fund in Washington, D.C. Marika received her B.A. from Hampshire College, 2001, concentrating in political theory and legal studies.

Katherine Fennelly is a Visiting Senior Research Scholar working with Doug Massey and Marta Tienda on “New Immigrant Destinations”: A Multi-City Study of Immigrant Experience Beyond the Traditional Gateways”, a study of immigrants in non-traditional destinations. She is Professor of Public Affairs at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Her research and outreach interests include immigration policy in the United States and Europe, the determinants of prejudice and xenophobia, and the preparedness of communities and public institutions to adapt to demographic changes. She has been dean of the University of Minnesota Extension Service, a faculty member and department head at the Pennsylvania State University, and a faculty member at Columbia University School of Public Health. At Penn State, she was a senior faculty associate in the Population Research Institute and associate editor of Demography. Kathy is bilingual in Spanish and English and has worked and traveled extensively throughout Latin America.

Leigh Linden, a Visiting Research Scholar at the CRCW, is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University with appointments in both the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs. As an economist, he specializes in the fields of development and labor economics, exploring the microeconomic determinants of income inequality and poverty. He is particularly interested in the use of social programs, and in particular education, to improve the well-being of children from poor families. Methodologically, he specializes in the use of randomized evaluations both to test economic theories of human behavior and to assess the efficacy of social programs. His main interest is in understanding the economic determinants of the wellbeing of children. This includes both understanding how the provision of various types of educational resources affects the development of human capital and understanding the factors that determine the demand for education by both children and their families. In addition, he is investigating political economy issues in developing countries, specifically India, hoping to understand the role of institutional structures and election rules in determining the outcomes of election and eventually the allocation of resources. Leigh received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Texas-Austin, where he received a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Mathematics in 1997.

Robert L. Wagmiller, Jr., a Visiting Research Scholar at CRCW, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His publications examine the causes and consequences of child poverty and the changing social ecology of urban disadvantage in the post-Civil Rights era. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Demography, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Housing Policy Debate, and Urban Affairs Review. He has received research funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Wagmiller holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago, 2004. His research interests include urban poverty, male joblessness, racial and economic residential segregation, child development, and quantitative methods.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Amy Kate Bailey received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington in 2008. She completed her M.A. in Sociology at the University of Washington in 2004, and her B.A. in Women’s Studies/Health at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997. Amy’s research focuses on race, social inequality, migration, and locational attainment. Her dissertation, “The Effect of Veteran Status on Spatial and Socioeconomic Mobility: Outcomes for Black and White Men in the Late Twentieth Century,” examined the life course effects of prior military employment, with a particular emphasis on men who joined the armed forces under the All Volunteer staffing policy. At OPR, Amy will extend this work under the guidance of Devah Pager and Doug Massey. Specifically, she will explore the effects of veterans’ migration patterns on population redistribution and racial composition, identify consequences of the All Volunteer approach to military staffing for communities that send disproportionate numbers of their young people into the military, and examine the military and the criminal justice system as dual institutions shaping the lives of African American men. Amy also researches lynching in the American South, and in a collaborative project with Stewart E. Tolnay (University of Washington), and E.M. Beck (University of Georgia), is using historic census records to create a database of lynch victims and their families. Her earlier research has focused on educational persistence among internal and international migrants in 1920, and the historical relationship between democratic revolution and declining rates of fertility.

Stefanie Brodmann joined OPR as postdoctoral research associate and project manager of the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF) in February. With Doug Massey she uses NLSF data to examine how different ethnic groups fare over the course of four years of college. Based on her doctoral work, she also examines immigrants’ economic assimilation in Germany and Denmark, highlighting the importance of educational systems and the school-to-work institutional framework. Stefanie completed her M.Sc. in Economics, 2003, and her Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences, 2007, at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. Her interests include ethnic minorities in the labor market, educational systems, and income distribution.

Dohoon Lee, a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, is interested in the family dynamics in skill formation processes and their implications for socioeconomic inequality. He is working with Sara McLanahan on the parent-child relationships in early skill development and the effects of family structure on child wellbeing. He is also examining the role of institutionally arranged career pathways in the linkages between early skill differences and labor market inequality. Dohoon completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008.

Anna Münch is a Visiting Postdoctoral Research Associate from the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel, Switzerland, where she holds a postdoctoral appointment. Together with Burton Singer she is working currently on a project about socio-sanitary interventions to nomadic pastoralists in the Sahel. Between 2003 and 2007 she undertook research in the North of Mali and built up a network of West African research and development institutions collaborating in the "West African Nomadic Pastoralist Research Group". Her main interest focuses on local illness hermeneutics, illness semantics, help seeking behavior, as well as on methodological bridges between humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, between north and south, but also between research and development as a transdisciplinary process between research and society. She holds a Ph.D. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Bern, 2007, but wrote an interdisciplinary dissertation about health perception and healthcare of Tamasheq nomads in Northern Mali.

Graduate Students

Aasha Abdill is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Sociology. She received her M.A. in Quantitative Methodology in the Social Sciences, Columbia University, 2007, and her B.A. in Psychology and English, Spelman College, 2001. Most recently, Aasha was Director of Research and Evaluation for Groundwork, Inc., a community-based non-profit supporting families living in and around public housing in Brooklyn, NY. Her research interests include understanding how local institutions can help or hurt the outcomes of youth and families.

Laura Blue earned her B.A. in History and Economics, University of British Columbia, 2004. Since then, she's worked as a reporter for TIME Magazine's international editions, first in New York and then in London, where she covered business, social trends and, especially, health and medical news. Laura's interests are in social capital, the determinants of health and longevity, and crime. She is a first-year graduate student in the Program in Population Studies (PIPS).

Dennis Feehan is a first-year graduate student in the Program in Population Studies (PIPS). He earned his B.A. in Mathematics at Harvard College in 2002. Most recently, Dennis was a Researcher for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle. He also did a post-bachelor fellowship with the Harvard Initiative for Global Health. His interests are in mathematical demography, health, and health policy.

Kerstin Gentsch is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Sociology. She earned her B.A. in Economics and Linguistics & Language at Swarthmore College in 2005. Kerstin was most recently a Research Assistant at the Urban Institute. Her interests are in social demography, migration and immigration, social linguistics, and survey methodology.

Kathryn Li (Kati) is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Sociology. She received her B.A. in Sociology at Rice University in 2008. Kati’s interests are in health, race, inequality, gender, and religion.

John Palmer is a first-year graduate student in the Woodrow Wilson School. He received his J.D. from Cornell Law School in 2003; he received his B.S. in Biology from Cornell University in 1997. John has worked for the U.N.’s refugee agency and various non-governmental organizations on issues of forced displacement, asylum, citizenship, and statelessness in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro. He has also served as a law clerk, mediator, and staff attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and he has done empirical research on the dynamics of immigration litigation in the federal courts nationwide. John’s interests are in human migration at the intersection of ecology and the social sciences.

Jessica Yiu is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Sociology. She received her M.A. in Sociology at the University of Toronto in 2008; she earned her B.A. in Sociology at the University of Toronto in 2006. Jessica’s interests are in immigration, race and ethnic relations, and network analysis.