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New Directions in the Sociology of Aging (2013)

Chapter: Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
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Appendix

Biographical Sketches of Panel Members

Linda J. Waite (Chair) is Lucy Flower professor of urban sociology and professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Population Research Center at the University of Chicago. She is also director of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging at NORC at the University of Chicago. Her current research interests include social demography; aging; the family; health; working families; and the link among biology, psychology, and the social world. She has conducted a pioneering study on marriage, which argues that marriage changes people’s behavior in ways that promote economic, emotional, and physical well-being. She has also studied the decision to cohabit, the transition from cohabitation to marriage and the characteristics of cohabiting unions. She has examined the role of religious participation over the life course and the lives of working couples with children. She has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of Michigan.

John T. Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service professor at the University of Chicago, the director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, and the director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Chicago, he served on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame (1977-1979), the University of Iowa (1979-1989), and the Ohio State University (1989-1999). Among the awards he has received are the Scientific Impact Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (2009) and the Presidential Citation from the American

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
×

Psychological Association (2008). His current research interests include social neuroscience, social isolation and connection, and the evaluative processes (e.g., emotions, affects, and attitudes). He has a B.S. in economics from the University of Missouri, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from the Ohio State University.

Andrew J. Cherlin is the Benjamin H. Griswold III professor of public policy in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His research is in the sociology of families and public policy, and he has published books and articles on topics such as marriage and divorce, children’s well-being, intergenerational relations, family policy, and welfare policy. He is the principal investigator of the Three-City Study, an interdisciplinary study of low-income children and their caregivers in the postwelfare reform era. He has a B.S. in engineering and applied science from Yale University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Nicholas A. Christakis is professor of medical sociology in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School; professor of medicine in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; and professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is an internist and social scientist who conducts research on social factors that affect health, health care, and longevity. His lab is currently focused on the relationship between social networks and health, engaging two types of phenomena: the social, mathematical, and biological rules governing how social networks form (“connection”) and the biological and social implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (“contagion”). Other ongoing investigations in the lab consider the effects of neighborhoods on people’s health, the biodemographic determinants of longevity, the widowhood effect (“dying of a broken heart”), and the genetic bases for human behaviors. Christakis was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2006. He has a B.S. in biology from Yale University, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, an M.P.H. from Harvard School of Public Health, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Melissa Hardy is a distinguished professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University. She conducts research in mortality, health disparities, the demography of work and retirement, and inequality and financial security in old age. Her career interest in the retirement process includes gender and racial/ethnic differences in the timing and precipitants of retirement, as well as variation in the nature of the transition (e.g., distinctions between partial and complete retirement; between short-term retirement followed by reentry and sustained retirement; between retirement

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
×

from career jobs and retirement from bridge jobs). Her current work involves expanding information available for the original four cohorts addressed by the National Longitudinal Surveys, revisiting the Tremin Study of Women’s Health, connecting early life experiences to later life outcomes, and the modeling of intensive longitudinal data and comparative data on aging. She has a B.A. in sociology from Albright College and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from Indiana University.

V. Joseph Hotz is the arts and sciences professor of economics at Duke University, where he joined the faculty in 2007. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the National Poverty Center, the Institute for Research on Poverty, and the Institute for the Study of Labor. He is an associate editor of Demography and has served as a co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources and the Journal of Labor Economics. His fields of interest include labor economics, the economics of the family, applied econometrics, and program evaluation. He has published papers examining the relationship between the labor force participation and childbearing patterns of married women in the United States; the costs and consequences of teenage childbearing in the United States; the effects of manpower and welfare-to-work training programs; econometric methods for estimating dynamic-discrete choice models; various aspects of the child care market in the United States; the impacts of early work and schooling experiences on subsequent labor market success; and the impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit in the United States. He has a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Hillard S. Kaplan is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico and is co-director of the Tsimane Health and Life History Project. His research examines the evolution of the human life course and has, at various times, focused on food sharing, fertility decisions, parental investment, sex roles, subsistence behavior, intelligence, and life span. His empirical work draws on fieldwork with a number of populations, including the Ache (Paraguay), Mashco-Piro (Peru), Yora/Yaminahua (Peru), Machiguenga (Peru), and Xhosa (South Africa). His past work on fertility and parental investment has also drawn on data collected from men living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has a B.A. in English from McGill University, an M.A. in communications from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in anthropology from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Utah.

James Nazroo has been the director of the Cathy Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester since April 2010 and joined the School of Social Sciences in October 2006. Previously, he was

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
×

a research fellow in the Department of Social Policy and Social Sciences at Royal Holloway, where he worked primarily on gender inequalities in mental health, as well as marital violence; a research fellow/senior research fellow at the Policy Studies Institute, where he worked primarily on ethnic inequalities in health; and more recently a senior lecturer, reader and professor of medical sociology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London, where he was head of the Health and Social Surveys Research Group. He has a B.Sc. in medical sociology from the London Medical School, an M.Sc. in the sociology of health and illness from the Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, and a Ph.D. in sociology from University College London.

Teresa Seeman is a professor of medicine and epidemiology in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, she was on the faculty of the Department of Epidemiology in the Yale School of Public Health from 1985 to 1995 and then spent two years on the faculty at the Andrus School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. Her research interests focus on the role of sociocultural factors in health and aging with specific interest in understanding the biological pathways through which these factors influence health and aging. A major focus of her research relates to understanding how aspects of the social environment, particularly social ties, influence health and aging. She was a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Successful Aging and is currently a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. In collaboration with Bruce McEwen and Burton Singer, she has taken a lead in empirical research on the new concept of allostatic load. She has a B.A. in French literature, an M.S. in public health, and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Michael J. Shanahan is associate professor and associate chair of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His current research is focused on molecular genetics and the life course, social context and wellbeing, and interdisciplinary developmental science. He was a postdoctoral fellow from 1992 to 1995 in the Carolina Consortium on Human Development, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a member of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Sociological Association (section memberships: childhood, social psychology, aging, mental health), the Society for Research in Adolescence, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Behavioral Genetics Association. He has a B.A. in classical languages from Loras College, an M.A. in sociology from the University of Iowa, a J.D. from the University of Iowa Law College, and a Ph.D. in sociology (with a minor in child psychology) from the University of Minnesota.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Research Council. 2013. New Directions in the Sociology of Aging. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18508.
×
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Next: PART II: PAPERS »
New Directions in the Sociology of Aging Get This Book
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The aging of the population of the United States is occurring at a time of major economic and social changes. These economic changes include consideration of increases in the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare and possible changes in benefit levels. Furthermore, changes in the social context in which older individuals and families function may well affect the nature of key social relationships and institutions that define the environment for older persons. Sociology offers a knowledge base, a number of useful analytic approaches and tools, and unique theoretical perspectives that can facilitate understanding of these demographic, economic, and social changes and, to the extent possible, their causes, consequences and implications.

New Directions in the Sociology of Aging evaluates the recent contributions of social demography, social epidemiology and sociology to the study of aging and identifies promising new research directions in these sub-fields. Included in this study are nine papers prepared by experts in sociology, demography, social genomics, public health, and other fields, that highlight the broad array of tools and perspectives that can provide the basis for further advancing the understanding of aging processes in ways that can inform policy. This report discusses the role of sociology in what is a wide-ranging and diverse field of study; a proposed three-dimensional conceptual model for studying social processes in aging over the life cycle; a review of existing databases, data needs and opportunities, primarily in the area of measurement of interhousehold and intergenerational transmission of resources, biomarkers and biosocial interactions; and a summary of roadblocks and bridges to transdisciplinary research that will affect the future directions of the field of sociology of aging.

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