Emma Riley is an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan in the Department of Economics. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford in September of 2019. Her research is in development economics, and her job market paper, “Resisting sharing pressure in the household using mobile money: Experimental evidence on microenterprise investment in Uganda,” examined the impact of disbursing microfinance loans via mobile money on the growth of female-owned micro-enterprises. She was awarded the Edgeworth Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis for her work entitled, “Essays on Mobile Money Services, Microenterprises and Role Models in Developing Countries.”
Prior to her PhD studies, Riley received her MPhil in Economics, with distinction, from the University of Oxford in 2015. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where she received her BA in Economics in 2010, with first-class honors.
Since completing her PhD studies, Emma Riley has been working as a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the department of Economics and the Centre for the Study of African Economies. Her research has a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and primarily utilizes large-scale randomized field experiments. She has on-going research looking at the impact of digital financial technologies on female enterprises and studying the effects of a village-level poverty alleviation program on household welfare.
Dennis Hogan is Professor Emeritus of Population Studies and Sociology at Brown University. He served as Director of the Population Studies and Training Center until 2000.
Hogan is interested in the life course of American adolescents and the ways opportunities in local environments and resources of parents are converted into successful transitions to adult life. His research includes studies of the health and disability of children and adolescents; population prevalence; access and use of needed medical and supportive services; educational and employment aspirations and experiences; and the impacts of children with disabilities on the lives of other family members.
Hogan has studied reproductive and child health in developing-country populations. His research has resulted in studies of women’s reproductive behaviors and dangers to their well-being, most recently Ethiopia, and participation in a longitudinal study of young people in Ethiopia as they become adults. He is collaborating with researchers at the Institute for Community and Public Health at Birzeit University, Ramallah, the occupied Palestinian territories, on research and on establishing a center for population research.
More information on Dennis Hogan’s research and publications can be found here.
Jennifer Laird is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Lehman College at City University of New York (CUNY). Prior to coming to Lehman, Dr. Laird was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University from 2016 – 2018. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Washington in 2016.
Dr. Laird’s research focuses on poverty and inequality. As a quantitative sociologist, Dr. Laird conducts her research using data visualization, modeling, and microsimulation methods. She has published articles that investigate the sources of poverty differences across U.S. states, employment inequality in the public sector, and unemployment among Mexican immigrants. Her research has been published in Demography, Social Science Research, and American Sociological Review.
D. Mark Anderson is a Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics at Montana State University.
Kim Korinek is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Asia Center at the University of Utah.
Korinek’s research examines the mutually transformative effects of social demographic changes, like population aging and population mobility, and individual and family level experiences of receipt of support, living arrangements, socioeconomic mobility, health care utilization, and other outcomes related to wellbeing.
Claire Rothschild is a Senior Technical Advisor in Sexual and Reproductive Health Strategic Evidence and Learning at Population Services International (PSI).
Oliver Rollins is a qualitative sociologist who works on issues of race/racism in and through science and technology. Specifically, his research explores how racial identity, racialized discourses, and systemic practices of social difference influence, engage with, and are affected by, the making and use of neuroscientific technologies and knowledges. Rollins’s book, Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of The Violent Brain (Stanford University Press, 2021), traces the development and use of neuroimaging research on anti-social behaviors and crime, with special attention to the limits of this controversial brain model when dealing with aspects of social difference, power, and inequality. Currently, he is working on a project that examines the neuroscience of implicit bias, chiefly the challenges, consequences, and promises of operationalizing racial prejudice and identity as neurobiological processes. Rollins teaches courses on science, technology, and society; race/racisms, social inequities and health, and bioethics. Rollins received his Ph.D. in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco.
Mia Bennett is an Associate Professor in the Geography at University of Washington. As a political geographer with geospatial skills, through fieldwork and remote sensing, she researches the geopolitics of development in northern frontiers, namely the Arctic, Russian Far East, and along the more remote corridors of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. She has conducted fieldwork along the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway in Canada’s Northwest Territories and is particularly interested in the role of Indigenous Peoples in leading infrastructure development in the North American Arctic. Mia received a Ph.D. in Geography from UCLA, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and a Master’s in Philosophy in Polar Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar. She has published extensively in both peer-reviewed journals and popular publications and edits a long-running blog on the Arctic at cryopolitics.com.
Samuel Jenness is an infectious disease epidemiologist specializing in mathematical and computational approaches for studying the drivers of and prevention strategies for infectious disease through the framework of dynamic transmission networks.
As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University, Jenness leads the EpiModel Research Lab and also collaborates on several projects in both methods and applications for infectious disease epidemiology.
Jenness’s methodological research focuses on the development of an open-source software platform for epidemic modeling, EpiModel, which allows users to build, simulate, and analyze complex mechanistic models for transmission of arbitrarily defined infectious disease systems. EpiModel provides a powerful toolkit for modeling dynamic contact networks that are often fundamental for representing transmission of diseases requiring direct contact. EpiModel has been used in over 50 scientific publications, both by his group and modeling researchers around the world!
Jenness’s applied research focuses on the epidemiology of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and other infectious diseases. He is interested in how we can use mechanistic modeling and network science frameworks to understand the drivers of these diseases, and to design and evaluate effective prevention strategies. Recent applications have used models to simulate the co-circulation of multiple co-circulating pathogens within the same population, since the risk factors for acquiring one disease may depend on the epidemic dynamics of other infections transmitted along the same contact network.
More broadly, the work of Jenness’s EpiModel Research Lab involves addressing these questions with research in the following domains:
- Infectious disease epidemiology
- Mechanistic/mathematical modeling of infectious disease
- Network science
- Causal inference methods for epidemiology
- Survey research design and analysis
- Computational epidemiology & scientific software development