Health in Social Context

Marcos is a Ph.D. student in the School of Public Policy. He is interested in development and environmental economics, and its relation to human capital.

Dr. Osuji conducts research on race and migration both domestic and international, particularly as it pertains to Africans and Afro-descendants across the globe. She has published research on interracial marriage in Brazil and the United States, including the impact of domestic migration on being interracially married. She is also interested in the impact of African migrants on notions of race and ethnicity in the United States and abroad.

Dr. Steenland is an Assistant Professor in Family Science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a health services and health policy researcher focused on maternal and reproductive health policy in the United States. Her research uses econometric methods to evaluate maternal and reproductive health programs and policies, with a particular focus on Medicaid policy. The overarching goal of her research is to identify policy options to increase the equity and quality of women’s health services.

Dr. M. Bishop is an Assistant Professor in the department of Family Science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, College Park. Bishop’s scholarship employs developmental, intersectional, and community-engaged approaches to document the lives and health of LGBTQ+ people across the life course, with a particular emphasis on youth. Bishop’s current research explores how youth development, social and familial relationships, school contexts, and structural stigma shape LGBTQ+ people’s health and thriving. Bishop received a B.A.

Monica Das Gupta studies the role of family systems in shaping maternal and child health outcomes in Asia; (2) public health systems for communicable disease control, (3) population, poverty, and climate change.

Dr. Hargrove’s research examines how racism and other systems of inequality become embodied and impact population health in the United States. Her current program of research investigates linkages among socio-geographic contexts, individual-level status characteristics, and biological measures of health and aging in young adulthood and early mid-life. Through this work, she clarifies how macro- and meso-level environments shape downstream pathways that affect more proximate causes of poor health and risk factors for aging-related diseases. 

At the confluence of social demography, medical sociology, and critical perspectives, my research interests center around incorporating critical perspectives in studying population-level health disparities. More specifically, my work utilizes perspectives grounded in intersectionality and critical race theory to motivate research regarding the fundamental causes of health disparities in the United States context, with a geospatial focus to account for variation in disparities across physical space.

I am a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Maryland. My research lies at the intersection of population economics, education, and gender, with a focus on how policy and environmental conditions shape human capital and family outcomes. Current projects study access to contraception and fertility, the intergenerational effects of women’s political enfranchisement, and how extreme heat affects student achievement and mitigation behavior.