2023

Allostatic load occurs when dynamic physiological set points become chronically dysregulated as the body incurs sustained stressors. Under chronic stress, multiple systems (neuroendocrine, immune, metabolic) respond to frequent activation that can eventually lead to cumulative inadequate response. A high allostatic load could function as an early warning indicator for potential adverse health outcomes, with allostatic load markers signaling the accumulation of physiological dysregulation prior to a clinical diagnosis.

This project has 3 Specific Aims. Aims 1 and 2 are well-developed and likely to generate academic publications and external funding (via the Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grants Program). Aim 3 is exploratory but has the potential to generate external funding via the NICHD (Research on the Impact of Policy Changes and Emerging and Evolving Public Health Crises on NICHD Populations of Interest (NOT-HD-22-038)).

The presence of large regional wage gaps that persist over decades has led to a large literature on documenting various potential barriers to the reallocation of labor. This pattern is especially striking within national economies as integrated as the U.S. One much discussed friction is the role of social networks in enabling migration towards higher-wage regions.

Federal food assistance programs, particularly SNAP, reduce food insecurity among the families who receive it, but high rates of food insecurity in the U.S. demonstrate that these benefits do not fully meet low-income families’ nutritional needs. Specifically, SNAP benefits do not typically last families the entire month, with food insecurity spiking at the end of the SNAP month for many recipients.

The comorbidity of mental and physical health conditions has substantial implications for individuals' overall health, well-being, and healthcare utilization. Individuals with comorbid conditions often experience greater symptom severity, functional impairments, and reduced quality of life compared to those with single disorders. Moreover, the presence of comorbid mental and physical health conditions leads to increased healthcare costs and utilization, placing a burden on healthcare systems.

Stratification research in the U.S. has historically relied on non-Hispanic whites as a reference group to measure inequities between the majority white population and racial and ethnic minorities (Malat et al. 2018). The practice is common in comparisons between whites and other broad racial/ethnic groups (e.g., blacks, Hispanics compared to whites) and in more recent work that disaggregates heterogeneity within broad groups (e.g., native- and foreign- born blacks compared to whites) (Kauh et al. 2020).

While there is growing recognition of the importance of structural racism in instantiating population health inequities, and also that historical racist violence and control shaped the social institutions and practices that today institutionalize racism, there are significant limitations in both the measurement of historical racism as theoretically important exposures, and broad gaps in the understanding of the mechanisms through which racist histories impact contemporary population health outcomes and inequities. We aim to improve understanding of the ways that historical racism

The goal of this project is to make transformative progress in the simulation of infectious diseases. The recent COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the importance and potential of epidemiological models. It also revealed short-comings of the employed methods which resulted in limited predictive power and ambiguity concerning the effectiveness of control strategies. Besides uncertainty in the available data, this can be attributed to approximations that largely ignore the heterogeneity of the population.