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.

Amy Kate Bailey’s main area of research focuses on historical violence in the United States. This scholarship has focused on factors that predict the intensity of mob violence, the characteristics of its victims, and contemporary consequences. Her current project examines the link between communities’ past experiences with collective violence and rates of infant mortality and other adverse pregnancy outcomes today.

Amy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Institute for Health Research and Policy fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a research affiliate at the University of Washington’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.  She was previously on faculty at Utah State University, and completed a postdoc at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research. Prof. Bailey earned her PhD and MA in Sociology from the University of Washington. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, among other outlets.

David Cunningham is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research examines the causes and consequences of community conflict, with an emphasis on historical and contemporary violence. An instructor and Executive Board member for Washington University’s Prison Education Project, he has received multiple awards for teaching and mentorship, as well as the American Sociological Association’s 2019 Robin M. Williams Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship, Teaching, and Service.

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.

John Dou is a research analyst in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He is part of the Bakulski research team, which studies the environmental and genetic risk factors of neurological disorders. His work examines multiple levels of omics data, including genetic, epigenetic, and gene transcription with exposure windows including the prenatal period.

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.

Mike Esposito’s research focuses on understanding the production of disparities in population health.

Dr. Esposito investigates how broad social systems – and their constituent institutions – are configured. His research ultimately seeks to understand how these systematically-distributed privileges and penalties arrive on population health.

This work includes studies that examine how the actions of specific institutions (e.g., law enforcement agencies) contribute to health disparities; research that considers how multiple systems overlap to gate access to generative health contexts; and, projects which demonstrate how social factors enter and distort social processes that are foundational to well-being (e.g., the association among education and health).

Dr. Esposito uses contemporary statistical methods – Bayesian and counterfactual-based mediation approaches at the moment – across his work. Esposito’s research has appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; American Journal of Sociology; American Journal of Public Health and more.

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.

Iris Gomez-Lopez joined SRC-Social Environment and Health as a Geoinformatics Data Analyst in 2018. Iris has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Texas. Her work in Computational Epidemiology integrates disciplines such as Geoinformatics, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing, Data Analytics, and Modelling. She held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan School of Information, working with the Neighborhood Effects research group. She contributed to creating the National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA) hosted at the University of Michigan. And currently, she is working on multiple SEH projects that aim to study the relationship between social factors and various health outcomes such as cognitive decline, chronic diseases, and epigenomic patterns.

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.

Hedwig (Hedy) Lee is broadly interested in the social determinants and consequences of population health. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. After receiving her PhD, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan from 2009 to 2011. Her recent work examines the impact of American social structure features, such as family and the carceral system, and population health.

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.

Devon Payne-Sturges is a  Professor at the University of Michigan, School of Public Health. Her research focuses on economic disparities in exposures to environmental contaminants and associated health risks with the aim of improving the science our society uses to make decisions about environmental policies that impact the health of communities and populations, especially vulnerable and low income. Dr. Payne-Sturges is currently conducting research applying systems modeling to better understand the links between cumulative environmental exposures and health outcomes among children and migrant farmworkers. ​ Dr. Payne-Sturges’s research has been supported with funding from NIEHS, the Environmental Defense Fund, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and UMD’s VPR. APHA’s Environment Section honored her achievements with the 2024 Environmental Health Career Award. Dr. Payne-Sturges earned her MPH and Doctor of Public Health degrees in environmental health sciences from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She values transdisciplinary collaborations to generate the informational bases for establishing environmental policies that are truly protective of public health.

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.