Box 1916

Maxcy Hall

112 George Street

Providence, RI 02912

Telephone: (401) 863-2367

Fax: (401) 863-3213

Sociology@brown.edu

 

Contact Information:
Brown University
Department of Sociology
Box 1916
Providence, RI 02912
Fax: (401) 863-3213

Year of Entry: 2007

Previous Degrees:  B.A in Economics (Honors), in French, minor in Mathematics, Middlebury College, 2006.

M.A in Sociology, Brown University, 2009.

Areas of Interest: Demography (population health, life course, mortality), International Political Economy (development, health policies, population issues), Human Development (measures of poverty and well-being), Quantitative Methodology, sub-Saharan Africa.

Other Affiliations at Brown: Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC), Graduate Program in Development at the Watson Institute of International Studies.

Bio: My eclectic intellectual interests lie at the intersection of demography and international political economy. Specifically, in demography I focus on life course, population health, and mortality trends. In development and international political economy, I am interested on the effect development policies, global health policies, population policies, and global integration in general on well-being outcomes.

Broadly speaking, my research agenda attempts to contribute an answer to the following perennial question: How are the livelihoods of populations in the low-income nations (and of socio-economically disadvantaged groups in the industrialized societies) affected by social changes that global development policies, globalization, and global integration bring about?  I am interested in using the Life Course perspective to explore the impact of social change on individuals’ well-being and decision-making. I have also been reading on multidimensional approaches for measuring poverty and well-being, such as the Capability Approach.  For society-level measures of development and well-being, I focus on non-economic indicators, such as demographic trends of health and mortality.

I am a research assistant for an ongoing project at Brown: the Jimma (Ethiopia) Longitudinal Survey of Families and Youth. I am also working on collaborative papers with Professors Dennis Hogan and David Lindstrom using data from this project.

My dissertation idea, which is tentatively (and broadly) titled “Linking Democracy, Development, and Demography,” will attempt to explore the effect of the transition to multi-party electoral system (the second phase of the Structural Adjustment Policies) on spatial inequality in infant mortality in Tanzania.