About Me

My work has focused on four broad areas: social epidemiology, global health, social stratification, and quantitative methods. During the early part of my career, I was interested in issues related to race and ethnicity, immigrant incorporation, and social stratification. I have now become consumed with issues pertaining to social epidemiology and global health, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how sub-Saharan Africans’ expressions of HIV stigma beliefs affect their private sexual behaviors. While this project has consumed my attention for some time, a future project based in South Africa will allow me to return to my scholarly roots in social demography and social stratification. Once the data become available, I will examine racial and ethnic differences in residential mobility outcomes, or in the quality of neighborhoods to which South Africans move. Access to safe neighborhoods is a severely understudied social phenomenon in South Africa that has implications for the ability of various ethnic groups to attain scarce but highly desired resources. Most of this new work is interdisciplinary, drawing on ideas from social psychology, public health, and sociology.

One's scholarly research is often related to personal experiences. I'm an immigrant. I was born in Jamaica and grew up in Guyana, South America, and in the Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. After coming to this country, my family had to participate in the same "race to the middle class" in which all immigrants participate to one degree or another. As such, issues surrounding immigrant incorporation, social stratification, and health outcomes are deeply personal.