May 3, 2018

See all of CPC’s posters presented at PAA 2018 here.

The 2018 PAA conference was held April 26-28 at the Sheraton in downtown Denver, CO. Researchers from the Carolina Population Center (CPC) at UNC Chapel Hill were recognized as poster winners in three categories of research.

Wei Chang is a PhD candidate in Health Policy and Management and a second year predoctoral trainee with the Population Science Training Program at CPC. Her research is focused on HIV prevention and access to care; gender dynamics and health services utilization; costs and efficiency of health systems; and impact evaluation. She was named a PAA 2018 poster session winner in the category Fertility, Family Planning, Sexual Behavior, and Reproductive Health for her poster entitled Contraceptive Methods and Intimate Partner Violence in Zambia: To Conceal or Not to Conceal?

Guang Guo is the Dr. George and Alice Welsh Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill whose research focuses on the intersection of social science and genetics. He has focused on fundamental social science issues such as social and health behavior and outcomes, production of social stratification, and bio-ancestry and the social construction of racial and ethnic identity. Using longitudinal datasets, Guo and colleagues have shown that genes and social contexts jointly and interactively affect social and health behaviors, including delinquency, number of sexual partners, alcohol and illegal drug use, and obesity. Guo and his coauthor Guangyu Tong from Duke University were named winners of the Health and Mortality poster session with their poster Social Context Interacting with Birth Weight Gene Influences Life Course Outcomes. Guo is a CPC Faculty Fellow.

CPC Fellows Carolyn Tucker Halpern, Kenneth Bollen, and Kathleen Mullan Harris and CPC Programmer Ping Chen were named winners of the Health and Mortality session for their poster Birth Weight and BMI Change from Adolescence into Adulthood. Halpern is Chair of UNC’s department of Maternal and Child Health and Deputy Director of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) with a research focus in adolescent sexual health. Bollen is the Henry Rudolph Immerwahr Distinguished Professor in Psychology & Neuroscience and the Dept. of Sociology advancing longitudinal methodology, causal indicators and measurement theory. Harris is the James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the Director of Add Health integrating multidisciplinary research within the social sciences and biomedical sciences to advance knowledge of health disparities.