Editor Roundtables – IAPHS – Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science

Date: Thursday, October 01, 2026

Editor Roundtables will be held at the Conference Hotel. Each table will be hosted by a Mentor with 8-10 registered Mentees to engage in an informal discussion. Lunch is included in the session. Each participant is required to pay a $25 fee to cover the cost of the lunch. Pre-registration is required to participate.

REGISTRATION

Table 1

Shannon Monnat is Director of the Center for Policy Research, the Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health, and Professor of Sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Monnat is a demographer whose research examines trends and geographic differences in health and mortality, with a special interest in rural health and health disparities. She previously served as a Deputy Editor for Demography and on the editorial boards of Social Problems and Environment and Behavior. She has also served as a special issue editor for multiple journals and is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Rural America in the 2020s: Shocks, Stressors, and Successes, which will be published by UNC Press.

Mathew Kiang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University School of Medicine. He received my doctorate from the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. He is currently an associate editor at Addiction, a leading substance use journal, and a section editor at PLOS Digital Health, a leading bioinformatics and health data science journal.

Table 2

Richard M. Carpiano is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. His interdisciplinary interests focus on how social and economic conditions contribute to the health of adults and children. Within this broad focus, a substantial proportion of his research- and policy-related activities center on two areas. One area concerns the social, behavioral, attitude, and policy factors underlying vaccination uptake and coverage (and refusal or delay). As part of this work, he has served as a member of the Lancet’s Commission on Vaccine Refusal, Acceptance, and Demand in the United States. The other area concerns pandemic preparedness and response. As part of this, Richard is a co-chair of the Lancet Commission on US Societal Resilience in a Global Pandemic Age: Lessons for the Present from the Future. Read more

Richard is a former co-editor (with Brian Kelly of Indiana University) of Journal of Health and Social Behavior, published by the American Sociological Association. He has also served as a guest co-editor (with Spencer Moore of Wageningen University) for a special issue of Social Science & Medicine focused on “Social capital and health: What have we learned in the last 20 years and where do we go from here?” Richard received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Sociomedical Sciences (with concentration in Sociology) from Columbia University, his M.P.H. from Case Western Reserve University, and M.A. and B.A. in Sociology from Baylor University. From 2004-2006, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/profile/rcarpian

Roland Thorpe

Table 3

Dr. Alexander Tsai is a psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Through his research, he seeks to understand how large-scale social pathogens such as stigma, discrimination, and structural violence affect the distribution of mental health outcomes in vulnerable populations in the U.S. and in eastern and southern Africa. Dr. Tsai is founding Editor-in-Chief of Social Science and Medicine–Mental Health and a Clinical Editorial Advisor at The BMJ. Previously, he was an Editorial Associate and Guest Editor for 2 special issues of Social Science and Medicine (2013-24) and Specialty Consulting Editor at PLOS Medicine (2015-21); he has also served as a non-handling editor on the editorial boards of several journals in global health, HIV, medicine, and psychiatry.

Bruce Link

Table 4

Dr. Rita Hamad is a social epidemiologist and the Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and the Social Policies for Health Equity Research (SPHERE) Center at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the pathways linking social factors like poverty and education with racial and socioeconomic disparities in health across the life course. In particular, she studies the health effects of social and economic policies using interdisciplinary quasi-experimental methods to generate actionable evidence to inform policymaking. She serves as an Advisory Editor for the journal Social Science & Medicine and served as an Associate Editor at Health Affairs Scholar during 2023-2025. In 2020-2022, she was the James C. Puffer American Board of Family Medicine / National Academy of Medicine Fellow. She provides consultation to state and federal legislators on the design of poverty alleviation and social safety net policies. Dr. Hamad mentors trainees at all levels in population health and health equity research, and lectures about the effects of social policies on health inequities. She saw patients as a family physician for 10 years in safety net clinics throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, although she is no longer a practicing doctor.

Bettina M. Beech, DrPH, MPH, FAHA is Chief of Population Health and Translational Science and Clinical Professor of Clinical Sciences at the University of Houston where she leads university-wide efforts to integrate population health across education, research, data infrastructure, and multi-sector partnerships. A nationally recognized leader in population health, Dr. Beech specializes in late-stage translational research with a focus on chronic disease disparities. Her work integrates precision health strategies to examine the impact of loneliness and social isolation on obesity-induced hypertension. She is a fellow of the American Heart Association. Dr. Beech holds board appointments with the Humana Foundation, the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches, Geisinger Medical School, and the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Sciences (IAPHS). She is the Editor-in-Chief of Population Health Management, a peer-reviewed journal published by Sage Publications.

Table 5

Jennifer Karas Montez is a University Professor of Sociology, the Gerald B. Cramer Faculty Scholar in Aging Studies, Director of the Center for Aging and Policy Studies, and Co-Director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University. Her research investigates trends and disparities in population health since the 1980s and the growing influence of U.S. state policies and politics on those outcomes. A major focus of her work examines why health trends are particularly worrisome for women, for people without a college degree, and for those living in states in the South and Midwest. Her research on these topics has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, NPR, and CNN; and has been funded by the National Institute on Aging, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation. Montez has served as Deputy Editor of Demography and on the editorial boards of The Milbank Quarterly, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Journal of Gerontology – Social Sciences. She has also guest-edited special issues of Social Science & Medicine (with Esther M. Friedman) and The Milbank Quarterly (with Shannon M. Monnat and Emily E. Wiemers). Montez received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin and did her postdoctoral training as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University.

Marino A. Bruce, Ph.D., M.S.R.C., M.Div., is associate dean for research at the Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine and is responsible for maintaining and expanding the research infrastructure of the college. In addition, he is a clinical professor in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences who contributes to research missions of the college and university as a faculty member and research investigator respectively. Read more

A sociologist with an interdisciplinary background, Bruce examines the full range of determinants as they relate to the onset and progression of chronic diseases among high risk under-resourced populations over the life course and across generations. His early work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) predoctoral, postdoctoral and early career research awards that led to high profile publications in leading nephrology, public health, and men’s health journals. Dr. Bruce has published over 120 peer-reviewed article and book chapters, served as editor of five (5) books, and is currently Principal Investigator or Multiple Principal Investigator on grants from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institute on Aging, and National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH.

Dr. Bruce is also active in several professional societies. He co-leads a Community and Faith-based Research Subcommittee at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), and serves as a standing member Lifestyle Change and Behavioral Health Study Section for the Risk, Prevention and Health Behavior Integrated Review Group of Center for Scientific Review at NIH. Dr. Bruce is also serving a five-year appointment on the Publications Committee of the American Public Health Association where is leading a taskforce creating the ‘Determinants of Health’ book series to be published by APHA press.

Bruce earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from Davidson College and master’s degrees in rural sociology, divinity, and rehabilitation counseling from North Carolina State University, Piedmont Theological Seminary, and Winston Salem State University, respectively. He earned his doctorate in sociology from North Carolina State University and received postdoctoral training in family medicine from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in biobehavioral health from Duke University.

He is also an ordained Baptist minister and is committed to leveraging his professional, educational, and clerical experiences to improve health among marginalized populations. His current work – to develop and evaluate comprehensive biopsychosocial models that specify how faith can “get under the skin” to slow declines in physical and cognitive functioning among men from under-resourced populations during middle and late life – has been featured by numerous global media outlets, including USA Today, The Today Show, and Time Magazine.

Table 6

Mark D. Hayward, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology, Centennial Commission Professor in the Liberal Arts, and Interim Director of the Population Research Center. His recent work has focused on two major topics: 1) upstream, institutional levers driving trends and inequality in U.S. life expectancy, and 2) how early life factors influence the risk of dementia decades later in life. Hayward’s work is highly interdisciplinary and incorporates lenses from “cells to society” to understand the complex drivers of population health problems. Hayward is a recipient of the Matilda White Riley Award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health for his contributions to behavioral and social scientific knowledge relevant to mission of NIH. He is active across the profession and has served in a variety of national and international leadership roles, including as Editor of Demography, a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Health Statistics, and as a member of the Committee on Population for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Hayward is a past President of the Southern Demographic Association and the Interdisciplinary Association of Population Health Science.

Magdalena Cerdá is a Professor and Director of the Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy, at the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Health. As of July 1, 2026, she will become Chair of the Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. Her work integrates approaches from social and psychiatric epidemiology to examine how social contexts and drug and health policies shape drug use and urban violence. Current funded research focuses on state and community-level policy and social drivers of opioid-related harms, including work on the impact of municipal harm reduction laws on overdose, a study on the effect of natural disasters on overdose, and an evaluation of the first publicly recognized overdose prevention centers in the United States. Dr. Cerdá has also published extensively on the application of novel methods, including machine learning and agent-based modeling, to the prediction of overdose risk and the evaluation of social and policy drivers of overdose and violence. By conducting work in these areas, she hopes her research can inform evidence-based policies to improve population health.

Table 7

David F. Warner, PhD is a social demographer and Professor of Sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Since 2023 he has served as Editor-in-Chief of Population Research and Policy Review. He previously served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and has been on the Editorial Boards of Research on Aging, Society and Mental Health, and the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, among others. He has published in a wide range of both social and clinical science outlets on topics related to health, aging, and the life course. His current research examines how social and relationship contexts shape health and health care among older adults.

Miguel Marino, PhD, is a professor of biostatistics in the Department of Family Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). He received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from UCLA and his PhD in biostatistics from Harvard University. He is co-director of the Primary Care Effectiveness and Quality in Latinos Research (PRIMER) Center where he focuses on development and implementation of statistical methodology to address complexities associated with the use of electronic health records (EHRs) to study health disparities and changes in health policy among Latinos. Dr. Marino is statistical editor for JAMA Health Forum and was formerly the co-chair of the NIH Community Engagement Alliance Needs Assessment & Evaluation Work Group and was on the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations for the Census Bureau. In 2022, Dr. Marino was elected as a member to the National Academy of Medicine.