Dissertation:

Food, Race and Religion: Dietary Acculturation in the Adventist Health Study

Dissertation:

Ghosts and the Imagined Past

My dissertation looks at the overlap between folklore--specifically ghost-lore--and the imagined past. What I want to know is how ordinary persons who tell ghost stories do the work of imagining the past, intentionally or not, through the act of telling.

Dissertation:

My dissertation assesses the theoretically relevant individual level factors associated with the 1990's crime decline. Through the use of longitudinal data for two cohorts of youth who come of age before and after the decline, I compare their engagement in violence from ages 13-18 and examine the extent to which several factors can explain the differences between the two cohorts in violence. Additionally, I examine the age-crime curves of each cohort and analyze possible explanations for cohort differences in their age associated declines in violence.

Dissertation:

Two Systems are Better than One?: How Interactions between Police and CPS workers influence Outcomes in Child Maltreatment Cases:

My dissertation analyzes how interaction between Child Protective Services (CPS) and police influence detection and arrests in child abuse and neglect cases. While there have been a few studies looking at how criminal actors influence CPS outcomes, little is known on the influence of CPS on the justice system. This is an important area to develop as CPS is intimately involved in the justice process whenever there are children affiliated with the case. Since the majority of defendants have kids, even when there are no issues of child abuse CPS is instrumental in arranging things such as custody and prison visitation.

Dissertation:

Education and Type 2 Diabetes: Decomposing Change from Cohorts Born 1935-1954

Dissertation:

Path Dependence, Anti-fracking Mobilization, and Shale Policy Divergence in New York and Pennsylvania

Dissertation:

Worth the Weight: Framing Social Processes as Weighted Social Networks

Dissertation:

Probabilistic State-Level Population Projections in India

Dissertation:

Using a unique data set that combines Dutch census information with detailed medical records, my dissertation explores the long term effects of in-utero malnutrition on health in late life, mortality, and intergenerational transmissions. I focus on cohorts exposed to large scale famine while in-utero during the Dutch Hunger Winter (1944).

Dissertation:

High School Racial Segregation & Racial Ethnic Differences in Aspirations and Attainment

Dissertation:

Educational Attainment and Late-life Trajectories of Health in Developing Contexts