Seminar Series

Modeling and computation for multivariate longitudinal is challenging, particularly when data contain discrete measurements of different types. Motivated by data on the fluidity of sexuality from adolescence to adulthood, Duke's Amy Herring discusses her new nonparametric approach for mixed-scale longitudinal data.

In 1960, the foreign-born population made up about 5% of the US population. By 2015, this number had increased to over 40 million and the foreign-born made up about 13% of the US population. As a result, the health and mortality of the foreign-born carry an increasing weight in estimates of health and mortality at the national, regional and local levels and among the racial/ethnic population subgroups. Irma Elo reviews evidence of the mortality levels of the foreign born, with examples of their contribution to health and mortality in the United States. This talk is Co-Sponsored by the Center for Biobehavioral Health Disparities Research (CBHDR).

Ridhi Kashyap discusses the demographic implications of one of the most striking expressions of gender inequalty — son preference. Kashyap examines both the postnatal manifestations of son preference in the form of gender gaps in mortality and health, as well as in the prenatal manifestations in the form of sex-selective abortion and sex ratio at birth distortions. Kashyap also looks at the long-term implications of son preference and sex ratio distortions for population dynamics.

There is growing evidence that the trillions of microbes that inhabit the human body have profound implications for human health. The microbiome is malleable, and it is sensitive to human environments, individual choice, and human behavior. Jen Dowd discusses her recent work on how the social environment impacts the microbiome using data from the NYC-HANES as well as the TwinsUK study. She also reviews future opportunities for future collaboration between social and biological scientists in cohorts such as AddHealth and the WLS.

Humans tend to form social relationships with others who resemble them. Whether this sorting of like with like arises from historical patterns of migration, meso-level social structures in modern society, or individual-level selection of similar peers remains unsettled. But new research suggests that unobserved genotypes may play an important role in the creation of homophilous relationships. Stanford's Ben Domingue discusses his recent work which utilized data from 9,500 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to examine genetic similarities among pairs of friends.

Surveys have traditionally been based on the idea that researchers can estimate characteristics of a population by obtaining a sample of individuals and asking them to report about themselves. Network reporting surveys generalize this traditional approach by asking survey respondents to report about members of their personal networks. UC Berkley's Dennis Feehan discusses his framework for developing estimators from network reporting surveys and reviews the results from a nationally-representative survey experiment that he conducted in Rwanda.

Race/Ethnicity and Health in the Trump Era: Evidence-Based Projections and Speculations

 

David Ribar discusses how children’s intellectual and behavioural outcomes differ conditional on whether their biological parents dissolved their relationships in high- and low-conflict circumstances. He explores how he utilized data from the 1st through 5th waves of the birth and kindergarten cohorts of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to study parental dissolution and conflict are associated with worse outcomes for Australian children, especially among the younger children in the LSAC birth cohort.

Smoking and obesity are the top-two leading causes of preventable disease and death in the US and significant sources of the substantial disparities in health between socioeconomic status (SES) groups. Pietro Biroli discusses his recent study that constructed poligenic risk scores (PGS) to evaluate whether these genetic variants mediate the effects of childhood SES in determining adult risky health behaviors. He also reviews the empirical results of the study through the lenses of a canonical economic model of health formation and addiction, extended to include genetic heterogeneity.

In this talk, Michael Kobor highlights the emerging role of epigenetic modifications at the interface between environments and the genome. Drawing on a large interdisciplinary research network of human population studies with partners from child development, psychology, psychiatry, and epidemiology, Kobor discusses how early life adversities such as poverty and family stress can ”get under the skin” to affect health and behavior across the lifespan.