MPRC Primary Research Area (PRA)
Dr. Rebecca Gourevitch is a health services researcher studying policies that impact access to affordable, high quality health care in the United States. Her work focuses on maternal and child health, particularly on access to high-quality prenatal and postpartum care and associated out-of-pocket costs.
Jessica Goldberg is a development economist who studies the ways that people in developing countries earn, spend, and save money. She is particularly interested in how financial market imperfections, behavioral factors, or other obstacles to borrowing and saving affect decisions about working and consuming.
My research examines the influence of environmental factors on health and behavior across the lifespan, with a particular focus on the adolescent period. I use a variety of biological methodologies to probe the mechanisms of neighborhood- and family-level influences on developmental outcomes, including functional MRI, genetics and epigenetics, and physiological markers of stress. A prominent feature of my work is to increase sociodemographic representation in neurobiological research by including historically under-represented groups in research design and implementation.
Sebastian Galiani is a Professor of Economics at University of Maryland and Visiting Professor at Universidad de San Andres, Argentina. He is a member of the executive committee of LACEA. In the past, he held positions at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and Universidad de San Andres in Argentina and was Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University and Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia) and visiting Scholar at Stanford and UC Berkeley.
Dr. Dunbar is a Developmental Scientist whose research focuses on understanding the unique developmental challenges that children of color encounter and the family processes and individual factors that influence positive adaptation in the face of these challenges.
How do everyday interactions become sites where social inequalities are produced, proliferated, and perpetuated? Using social psychological theories of intergroup relations, emotions, and identity, Dr. Long Doan studies how people react to the structural conditions and cultural expectations in which they find themselves, as well as how people’s sexual, gender, and racial identities shape others’ expectations of, reactions to, and treatments of them.
Sonalde Desai is a demographer whose work deals primarily with social inequalities in developing countries with a particular focus on gender and class inequalities. She studies inequalities in education, employment and maternal and child health outcomes by locating them within the political economy of the region. While much of her research focuses on South Asia, she has also engaged in comparative studies across Asia, Latin America and Sub Saharan Africa.
Philip Cohen, Professor of Sociology, has a long-standing research interest in the area of Gender, Family, and Social Change. In particular, he has published extensively on the gender division of labor within families, and between men and women outside of families. In addition to the substantive aspects of this research, he has maintained a strong interest in measurement issues in the area of household and family structure, which has included participating in Counting Couples research conferences at NICHD and consulting with the U.S.
Dr. Caudillo's research is focused on the determinants of outcomes such as contraception use, marriage, cohabitation, fertility, and behaviors that diverge from traditional gender scripts and heteronormative sexuality. She has a particular interest in how these outcomes are impacted by contextual phenomena such as school social environment, community violence, or state policy, and how these relationships contribute to reduce or reinforce gender, racial, and socioeconomic inequalities.
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.