Family and Social Change

I'm a PhD student in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. I'm currently studying how family obligations affect labor supply behaviors in Kenya. 

Kerra is pursuing a doctorate in Maternal and Child Health in the Department of Family Science. Her work centers around pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences. She is interested in the factors and policies that contribute to or impact rates of pregnancy complications and how those complications affect the mental and physical health of birthing people.

Melody Mann is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar and a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. Educationally, she has a background in child and adolescent development, special education, and developmental psychology. Melody's research interests center on equity and inclusion in education, with a particular focus on how disability, race, and sociocultural contexts shape educational experiences and outcomes.

Yi-ching Huang is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Maryland. She obtained her bachelor's and master's degrees in sociology from National Taiwan University. Her research interests include parenting, immigrant, Asian / Asian American, inequality.

Jaein Lee is a sociologist whose research focuses on mortality, mental health, social disorganization, and inequality, with particular attention to suicide, aging, and well-being in South Korea. His work also examines related issues such as time use, environmental justice, family processes, and community violence, often through comparative and population-based perspectives. Methodologically, he specializes in quantitative data analysis and computational social research, using large-scale survey and demographic data to study how social contexts shape health and life outcomes.

I am a stratification sociologist whose recent research focuses on changing gender inequalities in the United States and India. With Dave Cotter and Joan Hermsen, I am trying to understand why the U.S. gender revolution of the 1970s and 1980s seems to have come to a halt in the 1990s. With Sonalde Desai and colleagues in Delhi at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, I have helped field a 40,000 household survey across all Indian states. This panel survey analyzes the relationships of poverty, gender stratification, and social capital on health and education outcomes. 

Sergio Urzúa's research has focused on the role of cognitive and noncognitive abilities, and uncertainty as determinants of schooling decisions, labor market outcomes and social behavior. His research in econometrics is mainly concerned with the estimation of selection models with unobserved heterogeneity. Recently, he has analyzed the effects of early endowments on academic and labor market outcomes. His research agenda includes the evaluation of social programs in developing economies.

Dr. Smith-Bynum received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Virginia in 1999. Before joining the University of Maryland in 2010, she taught at Purdue University in the Departments of African American Studies, Psychological Sciences, and Child Development and Family Studies. Her current research interests include parenting in ecological context, African American mental health, adolescent mental health, African American family process, and racial identity.

Dr. Shenassa's work concerns the interaction between individual and social determinants of health. This work, which is primarily focused on maternal and child health, can be further categorized into two general areas: 1) developmental sequelae of in utero exposures to toxins; and 2) social epidemiology of injury.

Sayer is the Director of the Maryland Time Use Laboratory, at the University of Maryland. Sayer’s research on cross-national and historical determinants, patterns, and consequences of gendered time use documents how time in daily activities is a fundamental mechanism that reinforces and reconfigures gender, race and class inequality over time, place, and generation. Sayer's current projects examine how gender, race and ethnicity, immigrant status, and social class intersect with life stage variation in daily activity patterns, health, and well-being.