Health in Social Context

Grace's research centers on rare and sensationalized forms of violence, with a primary focus on school shootings. She examines how the built environment can influence and constrain decision making related to violence and victimization, employing open-source methods to systematically explore the spatial and situational dynamics of these rare violent events. 

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.

Codey is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Codey's research interests include descriptive and causal analyses of place-based crime reduction interventions, service utilization among people who use drugs, and the spatial relationship between overdose and gun violence.

My research interests center on social epidemiology and HIV, with a focus on aging among older men who have sex with men (MSM). My planned dissertation will examine short-term longitudinal patterns of health autonomy and loneliness, whether these patterns differ by HIV status, and how autonomy and loneliness may influence one another over time. I am also interested in how psychosocial resilience supports health autonomy and whether loneliness may mediate that relationship, particularly for older MSM living with HIV.

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.

Dahai Yue is a health economist in the Department of Health Policy and Management. His research focuses on social determinants of health and health policy evaluation. He studies how housing, childhood environments, public health insurance, and care coordination affect healthcare utilization and mortality. His work applies natural and quasi-experimental research designs to large-scale datasets, including Medicaid administrative claims and U.S. Census data.

Dr. Wilson is an environmental health scientist with expertise in environmental justice and environmental health disparities.

Katrina Walsemann's research examines how social inequities influence life course health. She is particularly interested in how the U.S. education system shapes individuals’ physical, mental, and cognitive health, independent from and in relation to other structural factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, and social class. She has published extensively on how early school environments affect health and health behavior across the life course as well as how student debt influences the psychosocial health of young adults and their aging parents.

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.