Amelia Branigan, Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Amelia Branigan is a social demographer with central interests in inequality, health, and the criminal justice system. She currently has three projects ongoing. The first project considers the social consequences of variation in visible phenotype, specifically focusing on body mass and skin color. A second project uses Scandinavian registry data to consider how infertility, defined as the inability to conceive a wanted pregnancy, is associated with differential outcomes in children ultimately conceived. Two new projects consider the interaction between health and the criminal justice system: the first interrogates the association between parental incarceration and child physical health, while the second asks how shifts in spatialized neighborhood violence, operationalized as transitioning gang boundaries in Chicago, affect a range of individual-level and neighborhood-level health and educational outcomes. Studies from these three projects have been published in journals including Demography, Social Forces, and Sociology of Education.