Cynthia Colen is a social demographer whose research intersects the fields of Public Health and Sociology. Broadly defined, her empirical work examines the causes and consequences of racial disparities in health within the United States, with a particular emphasis on maternal and infant outcomes. She is interested in examining the intricate ways that socioeconomic status and race interact to produce health disparities, especially among middle-class African Americans. Her research is largely quantitative and highlights lifecourse processes within a single generation as well as across multiple generations. She has published in multiple outlets including Social Science and Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, the American Journal of Epidemiology, Milbank Quarterly, the DuBois Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology.
