Richard Alba is a distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His teaching and research focus on race/ethnicity and international migration, in the United States and in
Europe. His research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Alba’s most recent book is
Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America (2009).
Margarita Alegría is the director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance. She is a professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and currently serves as the principal investigator of three National Institutes of Health–funded research studies. Dr. Alegría’s published work focuses on the improvement of health care services delivery for diverse racial and ethnic populations, conceptual and methodological issues with multicultural populations, and ways to bring the community’s perspective into the design and implementation of health services. Dr. Alegría also conducts research to help understand the factors influencing service disparities, and to test interventions aimed at reducing disparities for ethnic and racial minority groups. Her other work has highlighted the importance of contextual, social, and individual factors that intersect with nativity and are associated with the risk for psychiatric disorders.
Victoria L. Blanchard is a doctoral student in sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her broad interests include family studies and demography. She is particularly interested in fertility and child well-being. Among other research projects, she has contributed to a meta-analytic study examining the effectiveness of marriage education.
Cheryl Anne Boyce is the chief of the behavioral and brain development branch and associate director for child and adolescent research within the Division of Clinical Neuroscience and Behavioral Research at theNational Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services. In this role, she provides guidance on scientific research programs and consults with federal agencies, thosein clinical practice, and the nation’s public regarding clinical and translational research, developmental psychopathology, substance use, child abuse and neglect, early childhood, traumatic stress, health disparities, and social and cultural issues.
Randy Capps is a demographer and senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. Dr. Capps has published national-level reports on trends in the U.S. immigrant labor force, health care coverage of immigrants, health and well-being of young children of immigrants, characteristics of immigrants’ children in public schools, and integration of immigrants in rural areas. He recently participated in studies of employment services in the federal refugee resettlement program and the impact of immigration enforcement operations on children of unauthorized immigrants. He is currently investigating workforce preparation programs for immigrant youth and the implementation of agreements that allow state and local police to enforce U.S. immigration laws.
Nicholas J. Carson is a research associate with the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance and an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on improving the quality of mental health services for culturally and ethnically diverse communities. He has studied mental health service use among Haitian youth as well as culturally sensitive patient activation interventions for adults receiving mental health treatment.
Rosalie Corona is an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University and the founding director of the VCU Latino Mental Health Clinic. Dr. Corona’s research focuses on health promotion and risk reduction, primarily among African American and Latino youth and youth whose parents are infected with HIV. She conducts qualitative and quantitative community-based studies and has been involved in the development and evaluation of prevention programs aimed at increasing family communication about youth risk behaviors and family health history. Dr. Corona’s publications reflect her interdisciplinary work and include manuscripts published in psychology, public health, and medical journals.
Nancy A. Denton is a professor of sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where she is also director of the Lewis Mumford Center for Urban and Regional Research and associate director of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis. Her research interests include race, residential segregation, urban sociology, demography, and housing. Currently she is working on projects on the neighborhood contexts of children in immigrant families, home ownership, and immigration to upstate New York.
Katharine M. Donato is professor and chair of sociology at Vanderbilt University. Her broad interests focus on social stratification and demography, especially international migration between Mexico and the United States. Dr. Donato’s research has addressed questions related to the impact of immigration policy on the economic incorporation of U.S. migrants, the relationship between gender and migration over time and across space, social network and migration effects on the health of Mexican families, and immigrant incorporation in new U.S. destinations. She is currently writing about immigrant parent school involvement in three U.S. cities, a project funded by the National Science Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Donato is also editor of the American Sociological Review.
Ilir Disha is a doctoral student in sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His broad research interests focus on the relations between race/ethnicity and crime. His master’s thesis focused on anti-Arab/Muslim hate crimes in the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11. He is currently working on his dissertation, which explores the links between immigration and crime. More specifically, the dissertation incorporates measures of segregation and examines the effects of immigrant segregation on urban crime rates.
Andrew J. Fuligni is a professor in the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and the department of psychology at University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Fuligni’s research focuses on adolescent development among culturally and ethnically diverse populations, with particular attention to teenagers from immigrant Asian and Latin American backgrounds. He is a recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Boyd McCandless Award for Early Career Contribution to Developmental Psychology and is a fellow in the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. Dr. Fuligni currently is an associate editor of the journal Child Development.
Francisco X. Gaytán is an assistant professor of social work at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. His research focuses on the socioemotional and academic development of first- and second-generation immigrant youth in the United States. More specifically, he has examined the role of social support and social capital on the cultural, academic, and psychological adaptation of the growing Mexican immigrant student population in New York City.
Deborah Roempke Graefe is a research associate with Penn State’s Population Research Institute. Her research uses population-focused approaches to study public policy and family behavior and well-being, including family formation, health, and migration behaviors, particularly regarding immigrant families. Her study of gaps in health insurance coverage, with Pamela Farley Short, demonstrated coverage instability as a widespread problem demanding public policies to improve continuity. Her current health disparities research addresses the importance of residential context, including availability of medical facilities and the immigrant receptivity climate, for health care among children of Mexican immigrants and for immigrants’ health-related outcomes.
Matthew Hall is a doctoral candidate in sociology and demography at Penn State with interests in urban sociology, migration and immigration, social demography, and labor markets. His current research activities examine the residential segregation and attainment of new immigrant groups, the impact of immigration on native residential mobility, and the effect of legal status on Mexican immigrants’ economic and educational progress.
Donald J. Hernandez is a professor of sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He recently completed research on 140 indicators of child well-being for race-ethnic/immigrant groups by country of origin for the United States and a study assessing the extent to which socioeconomic disparities versus cultural differences can account for low enrollment in early education programs among Hispanic children. Dr. Hernandez also recently led a UNICEF project to develop internationally comparable indicators for children in immigrant and native-born families in eight affluent countries, and is using the Foundation for Child Development’s Index of Child Well-Being to explore race-ethnic, immigrant, and socioeconomic disparities.
William Kandel is an immigration specialist with the Domestic Social Policy Division of the Congressional Research Service, where he specializes in legal immigration policy. Before his current position, he was a sociologist with the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture where he conducted research on new geographic destinations of rural immigrants, immigrant integration, public policy impacts of rural Hispanic population growth, farm labor, and the role of industrial restructuring in demographic change. Before moving to Washington, D.C., he conducted postdoctoral research in international demography and income inequality at Penn State’s Population Research Institute. His book, Population Change and Rural Society, edited with David Brown of Cornell University, was published by Springer in 2006.
Ha Yeon Kim is a doctoral student of developmental psychology at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. Her broad research interests include immigrant children’s academic and psychological adaptation in U.S. schools, focusing on how their English proficiency affects their classroom interaction, relationships, academic beliefs, and performance.
Heather Koball is a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, New Jersey. Her training is in demography and statistics. Dr. Koball’s main research interest is evaluating the effectiveness of government programs and policies, particularly those that relate to the support of families and the welfare of more vulnerable populations. Her most recent work has focused on the integration of immigrants into new destinations, rural communities; the effectiveness of home visiting programs to reduce child maltreatment; and the relationship between marriage and health in the African American community.
Suzanne Macartney is pursuing her doctoral degree at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where she examines children in immigrant families and their neighborhoods. She is also a poverty analyst for the U.S. Census Bureau in Washington, D.C., where she is researching alternative poverty measures. Her research interests include poverty and social and economic policy.
Melissa Marschall is an associate professor of political science at Rice University and, in 2009–10, a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. Marschall’s research focuses on local politics, educational policy, participation, and issues of race and ethnicity. Her book, Choosing Schools: Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools (Princeton University Press, written with Mark Schneider and Paul Teske) receivedthe Policy Studies Association Aaron Wildavsky Award for the Best Policy Book in 2000–01. She is currently writing two books: one examining immigrant parent involvement in schools, communities, and politics; and the other analyzing minority incorporation in local politics.
Brian McKenzie is an analyst for the Journey to Work and Migration Statistics branch of the U.S. Census Bureau and a doctoral candidate at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His academic research explores neighborhood-level variation in spatial mobility and access to opportunity across metropolitan landscapes. McKenzie’s most recent work explores access to full-service supermarkets across neighborhoods in the Portland, Oregon, region. The GIS-based project sheds light on the role of public transportation in improving access to community amenities for residents of low-income neighborhoods.
Norah Mulvaney-Day is a research associate at the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research, Cambridge Health Alliance, and an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her broad interests focus on the mechanisms that may contribute to the persistence of mental health service disparities across the life span. Much of her research examines reasons for differential access to care at multiple levels of the mental health care system, from individual patient preferences, to community-level factors, to policies that have disproportionate effects on the delivery of care to certain groups. Recent interests include the role of social network factors in health behavior change, and how these factors may facilitate the dissemination of interventions and policies at the community level.
Jeffrey Napierala is a doctoral student in the sociology department at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His general interests are social demography and quantitative research methodology. Much of his research has focused on U.S. immigration, specifically its impacts on incarceration rates of the native born, the incorporation and assimilation of Middle Eastern immigrants, and patterns of Mexican immigration and settlement.
Suet-ling Pong is professor of education, demography, and sociology at Penn State. Dr. Pong’s research focuses on children’s academic performance and educational attainment, and how they relate to family, parental practices and involvement, teen employment, education policies, family policies, race/ethnicity, gender, and immigrant status. With support from a Fulbright scholarship, Dr. Pong has been studying the integration of immigrant children from mainland China to Hong Kong. More recently, Dr. Pong has been examining how the cognitive performance of immigrants’ children is influenced by parents’ migration experiences and premigration characteristics.
Stephen M. Quintana holds a joint appointment with the University of Wisconsin departments of counseling psychology and educational psychology. His current research involves developing and evaluating a model of children’s understanding of social status, which includes ethnicity, race, gender, and social class. Dr. Quintana’s multicultural research has focused on students’ adjustment to higher education, children’s understanding of ethnic prejudice, and multicultural training in professional organizations. He has been associate editor for the Journal of Counseling Psychology and editor for Handbook of Race, Racism, and the Developing Child as well as the special issue Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Child Development.
Catherine R. Roberts is assistant professor of community psychology at the University of Texas Medical School, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She has a long-time interest in the effects of social stress on mental health outcomes such as psychiatric disorders, sleep disorders, and suicidal behaviors. Dr. Roberts has conducted research on a specific form of stress, peer victimization and bullying, among adolescents. In her research, Dr. Roberts has focused on developing measures of victimization that better capture gender differences and differences among ethnocultural groups. She has been working on long-term effects of social stress on youth functioning using data from a large, three-wave prospective study of youth (Teen Health 2000) followed from age 12 to age 24.
Robert E. Roberts is professor of behavioral sciences, Division of Health Promotion and Behavioral Sciences, at the School of Public Health, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. His research focuses on the role of culture in relation to the etiology and natural history of mental health problems. He has conducted research comparing ethnocultural groups within the United States and cross-national research, examining the cross-cultural reliability and validity of measures. More recently, he has been working on obesity as a risk factor for psychological distress among adolescents and adults. He has published widely on depression, suicidal behaviors, and insomnia comparing European, African, and Latino American youth.
Anna R. Soli is a doctoral candidate in the department of human development and family studies at Penn State. Her broad interests are in family dynamics, sibling relationships, and family-based prevention/intervention programming. Her research focuses on family relationships and how they function as risk and protective factors in shaping youths’ individual development and the practical application of this research to family-based prevention/intervention programs. She is also interested in cultural values and practices and their impact on such family dynamics as parenting, co-parenting, and sibling influence processes.
Carola Suárez-Orozco is a professor of applied psychology at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, & Human Development as well as codirector of Immigration Studies at NYU. She publishes widely in the areas of immigrant families and youth, immigrant identity formation, immigrant family separations, and gendered experiences of immigrant youth. Her books include Children of Immigration; Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society; Transformations: Migration,Family Life, and Achievement Motivation among Latino Adolescents; and The New Immigration: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Professor Suárez-Orozco is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and has received an American Psychological Association Presidential Citation for her contribution to the field.
Stephen J. Trejo is an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on public policy issues involving labor markets, including overtime pay regulation, the experiences of immigrants, and obstacles to the economic progress of minority groups. Dr. Trejo’s recent work analyzes patterns of intergenerational improvement among Mexican Americans and how selective intermarriage and ethnic identification might bias standard measures of socioeconomic progress for the U.S.-born descendants of Mexican immigrants.
Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor is an associate professor of family and human development at Arizona State University in the School of Social and Family Dynamics. Although her research has included adolescents from various ethnic groups in the United States, the majority of her work has focused on Latino adolescents and their families. She is currently conducting research on adolescents and families of Mexican origin, with one study focusing specifically on Mexican-origin teen mothers, their mother figures, and their infants. Dr. Umaña-Taylor’s research interests focus broadly on Latino youth and families and, more specifically, on ethnic identity formation, familial socialization processes, culturally informed risk and protective factors, and psychosocial functioning among Latino adolescents.
Kimberly A. Updegraff is a Cowden Distinguished Professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the role of family and peer relationships in youth well-being, with a particular interest in understanding culture and gender dynamics. Her current work involves a longitudinal study of Mexican American families funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, beginning with youth in early adolescence and following them into young adulthood. The goal is to understand how cultural adaptation processes unfold over time and are linked to youth and parent well-being.
Jennifer Van Hook is an associate professor of sociology at Penn State whose research focuses on the relationships among sending country characteristics, the social and policy contexts of reception in the United States, and the health and well-being of the children of immigrants, including outcomes related to household/family structure, child poverty, welfare receipt, and food security. Her most recent work compares the levels of obesity of Mexican-origin children who live in Mexico with those living in the United States. Dr. Van Hook has also evaluated and revised methods for estimating the size, growth, and characteristics of the unauthorized migrant population living in the United States.
Meghan Woo is a doctoral student at the Harvard School of Public Health and a research consultant for the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance. Her doctoral work concentrates on the impact of racial identity, acculturation, and immigration on racial/ethnic mental health disparities with a focus on multiracial populations.
