Catherine “Rina” Bliss is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her research explores the personal and societal significance of emerging genetic sciences. 

Rina's award-winning book Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice  (Stanford University Press 2012) reveals how genomics became today’s new science of race. Her second book Social by Nature: The Promise and Peril of Sociogenomics (Stanford University Press 2018) traces convergences in social and genetic science, and their implications for healthcare, education, criminal justice, and policymaking. 

Rina is currently writing two books for a general audience. Let's Stop Calling Race a Social Construct (W.W. Norton) explains why the phrase "race is a social construct" is at once apt and inadequate to the ongoing confusion around race. Rethinking Intelligence (Harper Wave) shares insights from the burgeoning science of epigenetics to help us harness our environments to empower our minds. 

Sharon Bzostek (Ph.D., Princeton University, 2009) is an associate professor of sociology and Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at the School of Arts and Sciences. She is a social demographer particularly interested in recent changes in family demography and their consequences for child and family well-being, as well as social disparities in health and health care.

Prior to joining the department, Professor Bzostek was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at Harvard University. She is currently working on projects related to mothers’ re-partnering after a non-marital birth, better understanding survey respondents’ self-rated health, comparing parent and child reports about children's lives, and the effects of mixed health insurance coverage within families on children’s health care access and utilization. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Demography, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science and Medicine, and Health Affairs.

Joanna Kempner, associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University, works at the intersection of medicine, science, gender, and the body. Kempner’s research investigates knowledge production as cultural work, inscribed with and shaped by tacit cultural assumptions and social relations. Her award-winning book, Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health (Chicago 2014), examines the social values embedded in how we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. Kempner is also on the vanguard of research investigating what we do not know, aka the social production of ignorance. She is currently writing a book that tracks the role that citizen scientists are playing in the reemergence of psychedelic medicine.

Professor Kempner received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, participated in the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Program and worked as a Research Associate at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University. She has won several awards for her research, including the 2016 American Sociological Association’s Eliot Freidson award for Outstanding Publication in Medical Sociology, the 2016 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, awarded by the Society for Medical Anthropology, and the Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, one of Rutgers’ highest honors. She writes for a wide variety of audiences, publishing in journals like Science, Social Science & Medicine, Gender & Society, and Public Library of Science Medicine. You can follow her on twitter at @joannakempner or read about her work on her website at www.joannakempner.com.

Catherine Lee is associate professor of sociology and faculty associate at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. As a political sociologist, she examines how meanings of race and ethnicity shape social relations and inequalities across three critical sites: immigration; science and medicine; and law and society. Catherine is the author of Fictive Kinship: Family Reunification and the Meaning of Race and Nation in American Immigration (2013, Russell Sage) and co-editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (2012, Rutgers University Press). Her current projects include an investigation of the use of DNA testing in family reunification cases in the United States and Europe and of the meaning of diversity in U.S. biomedicine given shifting ethnic and racial demographics and the rise of multiraciality due to increased immigration.

Lei earned her Ph.D. degree in sociology at the University at Albany-SUNY in 2016. Lei's research and teaching interests include health, family, demography, and urban sociology. She teaches Introduction to Statistics in Sociology, Global Health, Statistical Methods in Sociology II, and Multilevel and Longitudinal Data Analysis.

Her research focuses on social determinants of health, family dynamics, and social inequality in different societies, including China, India, and the US. One line of her research seeks to understand how social factors, such as residential contexts, working conditions, and family dynamics, get under the skin to produce and perpetuate health inequalities. She has published articles examining how neighborhood environments influence educational achievement, children’s health and nutrition, and adults’ health. Currently, she employs longitudinal data from the Indian Human Development Survey to analyze how male outmigration influences the health of left-behind wives and children in India.

Another strand of her research investigates the determinants and consequences of young adults' prolonged dependence on parents. She examines the role of gender, race, class, life-course events, and non-standard employment in determining the timing of home-leaving and home-returning among young adults in the US. More recently, she investigates the impact of coresidence with parents on young adults' demographic behaviors, including residential mobility, romantic relationships, and sexual activities.

To read her recent publications, please visit her Google Scholar page.

Jacquelyn Litt is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is currently writing a book, Women of Katrina: Crossing Borders, Weaving Networks, and Taking Care which documents the strategies of survival women took to disaster recovery in the Katrina Diaspora. She is co-chair, with Kai Erikson, of the Social Science Research Council Network on Persons Displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Her primary research has been on motherhood, carework, and inequality, and she has many articles and two books on the topic: Medicalized Motherhood: Perspectives from the Lives of African American and Jewish Mothers (Rutgers University Press 2000), which was cited by the race, gender, and class section of the ASA  for outstanding scholarship in race, class, and gender, and Global Perspectives on Gender and Carework, with Mary Zimmerman and Christine Bose (Stanford University Press 2006).  She was also the founding Department Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies (2005-2011) and Principal Investigator (2007-2010) of “Mizzou ADVANCE,” a $500,00 NSF PAID/ADVANCE award to promote the status of women faculty in STEM at the University of Missouri. From this project she has published numerous articles on mentoring tenured faculty and established new mentoring programs at numerous universities. She serves as a consultant to NSF ADVANCE grants for faculty women in STEM.

 Air Quality Study

Norah MacKendrick’s research falls within the fields of environmental sociology, medical sociology, gender, food studies, science and technology studies, and consumer studies. From 2020-23 served as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Environmental Sociology. In 2023, she became co-editor of Rutgers University Press’s award-winning “Nature, Society, and Culture” book series.

MacKendrick is the author of Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics, which identifies the rise of “precautionary consumption” in the United States. She finds that chemical body burdens are the consequence of decades of regulatory failure to properly assess the health consequences of environmental chemicals. The burden of addressing this failure has fallen to women and mothers who feel responsible for protecting their children from exposure to chemicals, and do so through cooking, grocery shopping, and management of the household. The book reveals how discourses of maternal responsibility and consumer empowerment circulate within the campaigns of environmental health advocacy groups, and as well as through the retail landscape for organic foods and ‘green’ products, particularly Whole Foods Market.

Better Safe Than Sorry won the Best First Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food & Society (2019), and the Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the Environmental Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (2020).

In her other research, MacKendrick has examined the intersections of risk, individualization, and modern motherhood, as well as the dynamics of non-toxic consumption, “foodscapes” and science activism. Her research has been published in Gender & Society, Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Social Science & Medicine, Sociological Forum, Socius, Science Advances, Journal of Consumer Culture, Food, Culture and Society, Contexts, and Gastronomica.

MacKendrick is working on several new projects. One explores the social construction of hormones as risky technologies and substances essential for realizing wellness and selfhood. Another examines air quality and heat stress under climate change. A third, with Dr. Edmée Ballif, examines the normative arguments surrounding the place of plant milks in the diets of children and adults in Switzerland and the United States.

Ph.D., Rutgers University, 2010

Dr. Dawne Marie Mouzon, Associate Professor of Sociology, engages in research that seeks to identify and explain risk and protective factors for the physical and mental health of populations of African descent. Specifically, she investigates the interplay between social relationships, psychosocial stressors, resilience, and health across the life course among Black Americans. Her early work focused on testing presumed protective factors to explain “the Black-White mental health paradox”, or the unexpected finding that Black Americans generally exhibit better mental health outcomes than Whites despite their lower socioeconomic standing and greater exposure to discrimination. She since built upon this work by investigating how these risk and protective factors, along with status characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, and nativity status, shape mental health risk among African American and Afro-Caribbean populations in the United States.

Her current research program focuses on identifying adaptive coping resources and strategies African Americans use in the face of chronic stress and racial discrimination, with a focus on gender differences in these processes. Another arm of her research investigates the “marriage squeeze” among Black Americans, including preference for (and barriers to) marriage, romantic relationships, and opportunities for parenthood.

Julie Phillips, professor and chair of Sociology, is a social demographer with broad interests in mortality, health, immigration, and crime, and the ways in which structural features of society influence those outcomes. Her recent research examines the sharp increases in U.S. suicide rates since 2000, focusing on sociocultural and demographic explanations for how and why suicide risk varies across the life course, over time, and among birth cohorts. Her present work seeks to understand the mental health crisis and rising rates of suicidal behavior among American youth.

She writes for a variety of audiences, publishing in journals such as Demography, Social Science and Medicine, Health Affairs, and American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Her work has been supported by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the National Institute for Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, and featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio among other outlets. She served as a member of the New Jersey Youth Suicide Prevention Advisory Council from 2011 to 2016, and she is currently an advisor for the Scientific Council for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Dr. Phillips teaches courses in population health, demography, research methods, and statistics.

Kristen W. Springer is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006; MA, Yale University, 2000; MPH, Emory University, 1997; BS, University of California at Santa Cruz).

Professor Springer’s scholarship focuses broadly on gender and health, prioritizing the intersection of social and biological influences. Her current research explores how the anti-transgender legislative climate harms health access for transgender youth, with a particular focus on how youth of color are affected. Other recent areas of research include: 1) experimental studies of biosocial reactions to masculinity threats; 2) conceptual and methodological interventions for how to best research gender and health using biosocial and intersectional frameworks; and 3) quantitative analyses on masculinity ideals, socioeconomic status, marriage, and men’s health. She has published in journals including American Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Public Health, Gender & Society, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science & Medicine, and Social Science Research. Professor Springer’s research has also been featured in national and international news sources including ABC News, LA Times, The New York Times, US News & World Report, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. She teaches classes on research methods, family, gender, and biosociology.