2024 – Cynthia Colen
Cynthia Colen is a social demographer whose research intersects the fields of public health and sociology. She is currently Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology and a research affiliate of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. Dr. Colen received her Ph.D. in Health Behavior & Education from the University of Michigan and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University. Read more
2023 – Rourke O’Brien
Rourke O’Brien is an Associate Professor of Sociology & Faculty Fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of social and economic inequalities with substantive interests in public and household finance, economic mobility and population health. Read more
2022 – Alexander Tsai
Alexander Tsai, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is founding Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Social Science and Medicine – Mental Health. His own research focuses on understanding how large-scale social pathogens such as stigma, discrimination, and structural violence affect the distribution of mental health outcomes in vulnerable populations.
2021 – Silvia S. Martins
Dr. Silvia S. Martins is the Director of the Substance Use Epidemiology Unit of the Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and of the Policy and Health Initiatives on Opioids and other Substances interdisciplinary group (PHIOS). She is also the co-director of the NIDA T32 Substance Abuse Epidemiology Training Program at Columbia University and the Course Director of Principles of Epidemiology (P6400). Read more
2020 – Robert Hummer
Robert Hummer is the Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also Co-Director of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and President-Elect of the Population Association of America. He came to UNC in summer of 2015 after spending 19 years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as Director of their NICHD-supported Population Research Center between 2001–05 and Chairperson of their Department of Sociology from 2006–10. In 2010, he was presented with the Clifford Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement by the Population Association of America. Read more
2019 – Sarah Burgard
Sarah Burgard received a BA in International and Comparative Policy Studies from Reed College in Portland, OR and then earned an MA and PhD in Sociology and an MS in Epidemiology from the University of California at Los Angeles. Following her graduate studies, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Michigan, where she has since earned the title of Professor in three different U-M departments and with the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research (ISR).Burgard currently studies how systems of social, economic and political stratification affect work arrangements, families and economic sufficiency and shape the level of health equity by race, gender, socioeconomic status, and other key social identities.