The Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC) at Brown University, formally established in 1965, is an internationally respected demography research and training center offering an outstanding interdisciplinary graduate training program. Research interests include social demography, economic demography, anthropological demography, and population health.
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Brown University Provost and PSTC faculty associate David Kertzer
is author of a new book, Amalia's Tale, which chronicles an Italian peasant woman's pioneering malpractice lawsuit against the Italian medical establishment. A recent review of the book in The New York Times said that the work "brims with compassion and insight."_________________________________________
Associate Professor of Anthropology and PSTC faculty associate Nicholas Townsend is Principal Investigator on a new NIH R21 award, “Measuring Social Connection and Children’s Well-Being Using Multiple Data Sources.” Scientists involved in this project include Townsend and fellow PSTC associate John Logan from Brown, as well as faculty from the University of Maryland, the University of Connecticut, the University of Denver, and researchers at the Agincourt Health and Population Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Resources such as money, food, protection, opportunities, care, and emotional support that flow directly from person to person are vital for the well-being of children in poor countries that do not have strong markets or government institutions. The most common measure of social connection in population and public health research is co-residence, which has critical limitations. By integrating ethnographic, demographic, and spatial data from a poor rural area in South Africa, this project will develop new measures of social connection that can be used in social surveys.
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New Faculty Associates!
The PSTC is pleased to welcome several new faculty associates who are joining Brown in the summer of 2008. We provide here brief biographies of each.
Margot Jackson, Assistant Professor of Sociology, comes to Brown from social demography training at the California Center for Population, UCLA. Jackson will defer her arrival for one year to complete a NICHD post-doctoral appointment at Princeton’s Office of Population Research. Her expertise includes population health, stratification, and contextual methods. She will also affiliate with Brown’s Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) initiative.
Jessica Leinaweaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2005, and has served two years as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba. Her research has contributed to the recent reshaping of anthropological kinship studies, focusing on the ways that children are relocated and families reproduced in Peru. Her forthcoming book is The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Mobility and Morality in Ayacucho (Duke University Press). Dr. Leinaweaver teaches on the subjects of social organization, gender, childhood, and Latin America as well as an introduction to cultural anthropology.
Sriniketh Nagavarapu, Assistant Professor of Economics, is receiving his PhD in Economics from Stanford University. He will bring to PSTC and Brown complementary interests and skills in applied microeconomics, labor economics, and environmental studies. As a member of PSTC’s growing thematic area in population-environment interactions, he will bring his expertise in the analysis of the effects of development and growth on Brazilian deforestation through planting for ethanol.
Michelle Poulin, Postdoctoral Fellow, received her PhD in Sociology from Boston University in 2006, and has spent two years as a Population Aging Research Center Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation explored strategies for AIDS prevention among young people in Malawi; more broadly, her expertise includes gender and the family, and the use of mixed-methods approaches.
Leah Van Wey will join Brown as Associate Professor of Sociology, core faculty of the Environmental Change Initiative, and a faculty associate of the PSTC. Van Wey comes to Brown from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work examines migration, land use, and household livelihoods in developing country settings, most notably Brazil. Her research incorporates multiple methods including quantitative, qualitative, and spatial data. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 2001.
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