Innovation in Domestic Health Research
In 2011, CHW’s Program on U.S. Health Policy was created after receiving a generous gift from Daniel Spitzer ’79 and Eliot Spitzer ’81. The U.S. Health Policy Program sponsors research and activities addressing aspects of domestic health care and health policy. The program supports innovative faculty and student research, conferences, policy forums, and special issues in health policy journals. Below is a list of current research projects.
Active Faculty Projects
“Do Children Age Their Parents? Causal Evidence from Add Health and the Health and Retirement Study” Principal Investigator: Dalton Conley, Sociology
“Navigating Food Insecurity in the Post-Covid-19 Era in South LA” Principal Investigator: Hanna Garth, Anthropology
“Exploiting Healthcare Consumerism” Principal Investigator: Adam Goldstein, Sociology and SPIA
“Intellectual Disability and Adult Health-Related Outcomes” Principal Investigator: Kelly Noonan, Economics
“Gender Affirming Care for Transgender Youth: Associating Biological Effects and Psychological Response” Principal Investigator: Daniel Notterman, Molecular Biology
“A Type of Freedom” Principal Investigator: Carolyn Rouse, Anthropology
Active Graduate Student Project
“Exploring Sex Differences in Transcriptomics and Behavior in Response to Stress in Drosophila Melanogaster” Lead Researcher: Elisabeth Tawa, Neuroscience
Project Spotlights
“Do Children Age Their Parents? Causal Evidence from Add Health and the Health and Retirement Study” Principal Investigator: Dalton Conley, Sociology
Does raising children keep us young at heart? Or, alternatively, does the stress of childrearing prematurely age us? Evolutionary theory tells us that, over the long run, there is a biological tradeoff between preventing our own senescence and the effort expended on raising offspring. But how evolution shapes those tradeoffs in the species tells us nothing about whether, on an individual level, men and women who have more children age faster than those with fewer children. Researchers investigate this question by deploying an instrumental variable in two nationally representative datasets. The findings could have important policy implications. If childrearing takes a generalized health toll on parents’ bodies, parents might receive particular health services and/or social benefits to moderate that impact.
“A Type of Freedom” Principal Investigator: Carolyn Rouse, Anthropology
“A Type of Freedom” documents the lives of residents in a rural California county with some of the lowest life expectancies in the United States. By highlighting a diversity of personal stories, the f ilm underscores the fact that there is no singular cause for higher rates of morbidity and mortality. Instead, the film reveals the structural and political undercurrents that lead residents in this majority white community to prioritize personal “freedom” over long-term health and wellbeing.
“Exploring Sex Differences in Transcriptomics and Behavior in Response to Stress in Drosophila Melanogaster” Lead Researcher: Elisabeth Tawa, Neuroscience
This project has established adult overcrowding and social isolation as stress paradigms in Drosophila melanogaster via changes in survival or behavior. Additionally, it has identified sex-specific changes in gene expression in relevant stress signaling pathways following crowding and social isolation stress. Thus far, Tawa has found that overcrowding decreases lifespan in both males and females; induces hyperactivity in males; and decreases attraction to food, aggression, and social interaction in females. Furthermore, preliminary results indicate that social isolation increases both activity and aggression in males and females, but to a greater extent in males. Ongoing research will elucidate mechanistic relationships between social stress-induced changes in gene expression and behavior that differ between males and females.