Iliya Gutin is a doctoral candidate in sociology and predoctoral trainee at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, having received his BA in Sociology at the University of Chicago and then worked at the NORC research organization as a research analyst. His current work focuses on the conceptualization, definition, and measurement of health, illness, and disease in medical and social research, and how these decisions influence what it means to be “healthy” in a highly-dynamic and stratified society.
Specifically, his dissertation examines clinical, epidemiologic, and subjective ambiguity in our understanding of body weight as a health risk, and how we can better account for this uncertainty in studying population health. Iliya hopes to continue this kind of work throughout his career, collaborating with health researchers across different disciplines and backgrounds to achieve closer and more meaningful linkages between the health concepts, issues, and disparities we are interested in and the measures we have access to our data.