Socioenvironmental factors, molecular mechanisms, and healthy aging

Kelly Bakulski, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and the Data Management and Statistical Core Leader for the Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. She is a molecular epidemiologist and an environmental health scientist.

Dr. Bakulski’s research team goal is to understand the environmental chemical and genetic etiologies of neurological disorders. She has particular expertise in life course heavy metals exposure testing with dementia and in analyses across multiple levels of the genome, including the epigenome and the transcriptome. Dr. Bakulski’s research incorporates population approaches and laboratory experiments to develop biomarker and cell type tools informing molecular epidemiology inferences.

Reed DeAngelis is a population health scientist. He studies how the structuring of human societies allows some groups of people to live longer, healthier lives than others. He’s also interested in understanding how different groups cope with chronic social stress, especially through religious and spiritual beliefs and practices.

Jennifer D’Souza has been working as a data manager and research analyst with the Adar research group since 2012. She grew up in the Northeast and came to Ann Arbor for college, where she’s remained ever since – earning a BA, MPH and PhD all from the University of Michigan. She started out interested in medicine, but realized that her true calling was public health. Following graduate school, she worked in aging research before moving to her current position with the Adar group, where she feels lucky to be able to do data analysis to address important public health issues. Outside of “work”, she enjoys spending time with her husband and their 3 sons, staying active, and checking out the downtown Ann Arbor scene!

Michael Elliott is a Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research. He received his PhD in biostatistics in 1999 from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Michigan in 2005, he held an appointment as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and prior to that as a Visiting Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and as a Visiting Research Scientist at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Dr. Elliott’s statistical research interests focus around the broad topic of “missing data,” including the design and analysis of sample surveys, casual and counterfactual inference, and latent variable models. He has worked closely with collaborators in injury research, pediatrics, women’s health, the social determinants of physical and mental health, and smoking cessation research. Dr. Elliott has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C and the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and as an Associate Editor and Editor of the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology. He was Associate Chair of Academic Affairs for the Department from 2018-2021.

Jessica Faul received a BA in Japanese Language and Literature from the University of Michigan before returning to earn her Masters of Public Health and PhD in Epidemiology from the School of Public Health. She is a Research Associate Professor in the Survey Research Center, Co-Investigator of the Health and Retirement Study, and Co-Director of the ISR Biospecimen Lab. She is affiliated with the BioSocial Methods Collaborative, the Population Studies Center, and the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging. Dr. Faul’s work focuses on predictors of health across the life course. Her research integrates biological, genetic, and social science data and uses longitudinal modeling and time-varying predictors in examining determinants of health. She is currently leading a grant to identify gene-by-environment interactions and their influence on later life cognitive decline in the Health and Retirement Study and other cohort studies of older adults. She also leads a project to elucidate the biological pathways and networks through which life course social context influences subsequent morbidity and mortality. This work investigates how factors like DNA methylation, gene expression, and mitochondrial exhaustion interact with social factors like psychosocial stressors and neighborhood context to together influence age-related health conditions. She has also led the development of a series of workshops to train social scientists on the use of genomic data. As the Co-Director of the ISR Biospecimen Lab, Dr. Faul routinely advises on and designs biological data collection protocols for other large-scale population-based studies to help ensure high quality and valid assessment of biological data collected in the field.

Karis Hawkins is a first year graduate student in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health MPH program on the General Epidemiology track. She earned her B.S. in May 2024 from the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Public Health Sciences. She is interested in social epidemiology, examining the effects of social factors on health and research related to the intersection of social contexts and health. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and trying out new recipes. Her specialty is baking.

Through her entire research program, Margaret Hicken is committed to clarifying the social causes and biological mechanisms underlying population patterns in health. The major hallmark of her research is the integration of scientific knowledge from across disciplines, as this transdisciplinary approach allows for creative and innovative insights into the root drivers of these patterns. She has built, from the ground up, a research program around her conceptual framework that integrates humanist and social science scholarship on US society to the biological literature on stress biology, molecular mechanisms, and health. For example, her research suggests that social exposures amplify the health impact of environmental exposures, providing important evidence that multiple features of American society operate together to drive population health patterns.

Nita Kanney is a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health. Before coming to Michigan, she completed her Master’s in Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. During this time, she worked on DNA methylation data, including collaborating on an epigenome-wide association study and leading a publication examining the association between gestational diabetes and DNA methylation aging. Currently, she works as a graduate student research assistant working on analysis using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) dataset to explore how self-reported early life exposures may impact DNA methylation in later life. My dissertation seeks to expand on this work by examining how social, structural, and environmental factors are embodied and reflected through differences in DNA methylation. When I’m not conducting research, I enjoy discovering new books to read, painting, spending time with family and friends, and exploring new places.

Colter Mitchell’s research utilizes a range of biological data types such as epigenetics, neuroimaging, and genetics to better understand how social conditions shape population health. In particular his work uses these biomarkers to elucidate pathways by which social contexts cause different health outcomes. This research uses longitudinal population-based studies where biological data are collected at multiple timepoints. His research also includes the development of new methods for integrating the collection and analysis of biological and social data.

Paul Mohai’s teaching and research interests are focused on environmental justice, public opinion and the environment, and influences on environmental policy making. He is a founder of the Environmental Justice Program at the University of Michigan and a major contributor to the growing body of quantitative research examining disproportionate environmental burdens on communities. His current research involves national level studies examining the causes of environmental differences and the role environmental factors play in accounting for differences in population health outcomes. Through a grant from the Kresge Foundation, he is also examining pollution burdens around public schools and the links between such burdens and student performance and health.

Konstantinos Papaefthymiou joined Social Environment and Health as a data project manager, having worked as a data curator at ICPSR and a research affiliate at USC CREATE prior. He holds a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Southern California and has contributed to research on topics including disaster resilience and environmental economics.

Rich Puchalsky started working on public access to environmental data in 1991 with the RTK NET project for the nonprofit group OMB Watch. He has run his own business, Grassroots Connection, since 1997, working on a large number of projects involving environmental, demographic, and financial data for various nonprofit and academic entities. Among these projects was Fedspending.org, which the Obama administration later licensed as the first iteration of its USASpending.gov online database of federal contracts and grants. His prominent current projects are Subsidy Tracker, Violation Tracker, and Covid Stimulus Watch for the nonprofit group Good Jobs First and Toxic 100 and Greenhouse 100 for the Political Economy Research Institute at UMass.