Elections

I am a social demographer with interests in inequalities and trends in US morbidity, chronic diseases, and mortality. My research spans three substantive areas related to these topics. First, I am interested in cohort-based changes in life course mechanisms of health outcomes. Early-life environments (e.g., nutrition), resources in adulthood (e.g., education), and health risk behaviors (e.g., smoking) have all substantively changed across US birth cohorts. These social and historical changes from decades past continue to shape present-day US health and longevity. Much of my research looks at how these cohort-based forces affect adult health beyond present-day policies, behaviors, and medical/pharmacological technologies. Read more

Biographical Sketch

Selena E. Ortiz, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Administration at The Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarship focuses on addressing health disparities and ensuring health equity. Dr. Ortiz’ work does this in two ways: first, by examining health and social policy formation and, second, by examining access to health services and outcomes. One main area of her research uses mixed-methods approaches to examine how cognitive frames and values influence policy agenda setting, public deliberation, public opinion, health disparities, and health care decision-making. Topics of interest include the social determinants of health, particularly housing affordability, and chronic disease. Read more

Nadia Islam, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Health at the NYU School of Medicine.  Her research focuses on developing culturally relevant community-clinical linkage models to promote health equity in disadvantaged communities. She is the Deputy Director of the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health, a NIH-funded Research Center of Excellence dedicated to reducing health disparities facing Asian American communities; Research Director of the NYU-CUNY Prevention Research Center; and co-directs the Community Engagement and Population Health Research core of NYU’s Clinical Translational Science Institute.  She also serves as the principal investigator on several NIH- and CDC-funded initiatives evaluating the impact of community health worker interventions on chronic disease management and prevention in diverse populations. Read more

Steven H. Woolf, MD, MPH is Director Emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. He directed the Center from its founding in 2007 through March 2018. As Director Emeritus, he continues to play a pivotal role at the Center, with a concentration on public policy issues, writing, and partnerships with colleagues and institutions devoted to population health and social justice. Dr. Woolf, a Professor of Family Medicine and Population Health, has focused his career on raising public awareness about the social, economic, and environmental conditions that shape health and produce inequities. Read more

Biographical Sketch
Kasim is actively involved in UNM’s Institute for the Study of “Race” & Social Justice, the NIH-funded Engaged for Equity project, as well as the NIH-funded Transdisciplinary Research, Equity & Engagement Center for Advancing Behavioral Health. Kasim’s research interests include utilizing a social determinants of health perspective to understand how ethnoracial and socioeconomic stratification contributes to health inequities. Specifically, he is interested in the demography of sexual minorities in the United States; whereby examinations of health serve as a lens of stratification. In assessing contextual determinants of health, Kasim draws upon sociological concepts of neighborhood dynamics and mass incarceration as a lens for understanding ethnoracial and socioeconomic stratification. Read more