2020 IAPHS CONFERENCE “Policies, Places, and Profits: Manufacturers of Illness and Health“
September 30 – October 2, 2020 Minneapolis, Minnesota
Conference Program Chairs
Jennifer Karas Montez
Jennifer Karas Montez is a Professor of Sociology, the Gerald B. Cramer Faculty Scholar in Aging Studies, and Co-Director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University. The main focus of her research is explaining the troubling trends and growing inequalities in how healthy and long Americans live. Much of her work over the past decade has examined why those outcomes are particularly worrisome for women, for people without a college degree, and for people living in states in the South and Midwest. In her current work, she is investigating how the polarizing policy environment at the US state level has contributed to the trends and inequalities. Read more
Dr. Montez’s research portfolio is supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation. She is currently the principal investigator of a 5-year NIA grant (with collaborators Anna Zajacova, Mark Hayward, Steven Woolf, and Jason Beckfield) to examine how US state policies influence people’s risk of death, and why those policies are particularly consequential for people without a college degree. Montez is also a co-PI (with Jennifer Ailshire, Sarah Burgard, and Robert Hummer) on the NIA-supported Network on Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America, which promotes and supports innovative and interdisciplinary research into health disparities across the life course and in geographic context. She is also collaborating with Douglas Wolf and Shannon Monnat on an RWJF-funded project to examine how the recent proliferation of US state preemption laws has affected population health and health disparities. Montez is also a recipient of a Carnegie Fellowship, for which she is tracing how decades of deregulation and devolution of political authority has shaped US life expectancy. Montez earned a 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.
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Shannon M. Monnat
Shannon Monnat is Associate Professor of Sociology, the Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, and the Co-Director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University. Monnat’s research interests broadly fall at the intersection of place, public policy, and population health. A common theme binding much of her research is a concern for rural people and places. Much of her work over the past several years has focused on geographic differences in opioid and other drug-related mortality rates, particularly trying to understand the economic, social, and policy factors that are driving these spatial differences. Read more
Monnat’s projects are currently funded by the National Institute on Aging, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Institute of Justice. She is a Co-PI (with Leif Jensen, Lori Hunter, John Green, and Martin Sliwinski) on the new NIA-funded (R24) Interdisciplinary Network on Rural Population Health and Aging, which aims to bring together a multidisciplinary group of scientists to study the multilevel and multidimensional exposures shaping and being shaped by health and aging trends among different rural populations and regions. She is also a Co-Investigator on the NIA-funded R24 Network on Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America. Monnat is also collaborating with Jennifer Karas Montez and Doug Wolf on an RWJF-funded study to examine the role of state preemption laws on infant birth and working-age adult mortality trends. Monnat is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Rising Midlife Mortality Rates and Socioeconomic Disparities. Monnat earned a PhD in Sociology from the State University of New York at Albany.
