Seminar Series

Qualitative research suggests that mothers play a critical role in supporting adult children both during and after experiences of incarceration, yet the implications of incarceration for the parents of incarcerated individuals have been relatively unexplored in existing research. Wealth research has also largely overlooked questions of how adult children influence parental wealth, tending to instead focus on downward intergenerational processes and transfers from older generations to younger generations. Using mother-child linked data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult cohort, we investigate whether child incarceration appears to influence maternal wealth, what mechanisms play the largest role in driving this relationship, and, finally, whether accounting for child incarceration history helps to explain the racial wealth gap among American women.

Mass incarceration is a term that describes a historically, comparatively, and demographically unique situation in the United States. It is historically unique because the incarceration rate—especially the prison incarceration rate—grew fourfold in just 30 years, after a long period of relative stability. It is comparatively unique because the U.S. leads the world in incarcerating its citizens. And it is demographically unique because the burden of incarceration is borne disproportionately by men of color. The objective of this study is to document the ways that the experience of incarceration reverberates across many life course domains: employment, education, marriage, fertility, mortality, and health.

The geroscience hypothesis posits that common biological mechanisms of aging drive susceptibility of aged individuals to functional decline, multi-morbidity, and death. This seminar will review how we are creating new translational frameworks to test the geroscience hypothesis. Specific examples will include evaluating biomarkers and interventions on cellular senescence, developing aging outcomes and feasible biomarker strategies for clinical trials testing pharmacologic and lifestyle interventions, and re-envisioning existing translational resources to accelerate the pace of geroscience.

Ten Years in Balaka outlines the main contours of population change in Balaka, Malawi between 2009-2019. This includes rapid population growth, urbanisation, the introduction and proliferation of mobile phones, educational expansion, the arrival of new technologies for treating HIV and a series of three distinct policies for rationing treatment in an environment of high-demand and limited resources. This is a decade of significant social transformation and uncertainty is a predictable accompaniment of change. Dr Jenny Trinitapoli will introduce the Tsogolo La Thanzi (TLT) study, describing its origins, design, procedures, epistemological underpinnings and limitations.

In this presentation, I will discuss my efforts to connect evolutionary medicine and global health through research in Madagascar. Working with Malagasy partners, we are investigating human and animal health in a rural village in northeastern Madagascar. I will discuss two major groups of projects. One set of projects considers how Malagasy lifestyles – and the ways these lifestyles are changing – influences health and disease. The other projects consider how human land use influences human-animal interactions and zoonotic disease risk.

According to brain science, older adults should be emotionally dysregulated and unmotivated. According to behavioral science, the opposite is true. As a graduate student, post-doc, and now faculty member I’ve spent the last 15 or so years trying to figure out how any of this possibly makes sense. I’ll share some progress we’ve made using PET imaging to understand how the dopamine system changes with age and some recent experience sampling data on how self-regulation in everyday life (specifically, controlling temptations) might shift as we get older.

Although recent news about gun deaths, gun ownership and gun legislation is disheartening, a slightly longer time horizon provides more promising news. From 1991 to 2016 most states implemented more restrictive gun laws, and the US experienced a decline in household gun ownership and a drop in gun deaths. This article examines whether changes in the household firearm ownership rate (HFR) from 1991 to 2016 within US states are associated with changes in the rate of gun deaths.

Governments, organizations, practitioners and funders alike rely on the steady production, promotion, and dissemination of scientific knowledge on family planning behaviors. The existing empirical evidence is rich and diverse, but this body of research is extremely heterogeneous and disparate, making it difficult to draw conclusions about how best to advance the field of research and practice. The need for such assessments is crucial as there are still countries and regions where contraceptive uptake has stalled. Our scoping review of the peer-reviewed literature published between 2000-2016 on the determinants of contraceptive use, non-use and unmet need aims to understand the state of knowledge in the field by examining where, when, how, and by whom is research conducted and to what impact.

In this presentation, Professor Yu Xie first documents a sharp rise in economic inequality in contemporary China, drawing on newly available survey data collected by several Chinese university survey organizations. He then presents results from his research program on the impact of rising economic inequality on a variety of social and demographic outcomes in China: intergenerational mobility, mortality, marriage age, marriage partner choice, and fertility.