Faculty Collaborators

Abigail R.A. Aiken (Ph.D. in Public Policy, University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin LBJ School and faculty research associate at the Population Research Center. Her research focuses on reproductive health and spans several disciplines, combining backgrounds in biomedical sciences, public policy, demography and public health. Her current projects include: examining women's experiences obtaining self-sourced abortion in contexts where legislative barriers prevent access to safe, legal abortion through the health care system; evaluating programs and policies designed to increase access to contraception in the postpartum and postabortion setting; and investigating the determinants and impacts of unintended pregnancies through a health equity and reproductive justice framework.

Sandra Valongueiro Alves (Ph.D. in Demography, University of Texas at Austin) is a medical doctor from the State University of Pernambuco (UPE). Dr. Valongueiro Alves also has a M.A. in demography from the Federal University of Minas Gerais – UFMG. She has been a researcher at the Graduate Program in Public Health at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Recife, since 2006. Dr. Valongueiro Alves has worked in public health, focusing on maternal mortality and abortion, gender-based violence, reproductive health, and information on mortality. Currently, Dr. Valongueiro Alves is involved with MERG (Microcephaly Epidemic Research Group). She is also a member of the Maternal Mortality Committee of Pernambuco.

Jennifer S. Barber (Ph.D. in Sociology, Pennsylvania State University) is a Professor of Sociology and a Senior Scientist at the Kinsey Institute. Barber's research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of family sociology, demography, and social psychology, with a focus on young pregnancy, intimate relationships, reproductive control, and intimate partner violence. From 2008-2012, she directed the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL) project, which was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. It included weekly surveys from 1,000 18- and 19-year-old women for 2.5 years, along with 75+ semi-structured interviews. Ongoing work with the RDSL dataset integrates statistical and qualitative analyses, and focuses on the types of attitudes, intimate relationships, and contraceptive practices that lead to young pregnancy and to women’s control over reproductive processes. Current projects focus specifically on (1) how violent and/or demanding intimate partners derail young women's post-secondary education plans, (2) how and why the dissolution of violent and non-violent intimate relationships during the transition to adulthood varies across sociodemographic groups, and (3) how intimate relationships shape young women’s expectations and ability to control heterosexual intercourse and contraceptive use.

Raquel Zanatta Coutinho (Ph.D. in Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is an adjunct professor in the Demography department at Cedeplar/UFMG. Dr. Coutinho also holds a M.A. in Sociology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as a M.A. in Demography from the Center for Development and Regional Planning of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Cedeplar/UFMG). As a post-doctoral scholar (Cedeplar/UFMG), she worked with data collection and analysis of two studies on Zika and vulnerability. Her current research interests focus on women's sexual and reproductive health and the contexts and inequalities that mediate the relationship between fertility intentions and outcomes.

Molly Dondero (Ph.D. in Sociology/Demography, University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor in the department of Sociology at American University. Her research focuses on how immigration, race/ethnicity, social class, and place contribute to population-level inequality in health and well-being in the United States and Latin America. Her recent work has been published in Social Forces, Demography, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, and Population Research and Policy Review. Prior to joining the faculty at American University, she was a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development postdoctoral fellow at the Population Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University.

Gilvan Guedes (Ph.D. in Demography, CEDEPLAR / UFMG) is an associate professor of Demography at the Center for Regional Development and Planning (CEDEPLAR) at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. Dr. Guedes was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University, and spent his sabbatical at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Dr. Guedes’ research has focused on the many ways in which population and environmental issues connect. In the last few years, he has devoted research efforts to understanding the connection between land use systems and household demography, environmental attitude and behavior, field and quantitative methods applied to population studies, and economic development.

Rachel Lowe (Ph.D. in Statistical Modelling, University of Exeter) is an associate professor and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as well as a visiting scholar at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health. Her broad research interests lie in understanding how environmental and socio-economic factors interact to determine the risk of disease transmission. She is currently focused on modelling the relationship between climatic, socio-economic and demographic factors on vector-borne diseases, such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya and malaria. She also works on the UK Space Agency Project, developing a dengue early warning system based on climate forecasts.  

Alexandre Gori Maia (Ph.D. in Applied Economics, University of Campinas, UNICAMP) is an Associate Professor at UNICAMP,  where he heads the Department of Economic Theory. Dr. Gori Maia is a specialist in applied econometrics and development economics. His research focuses on demographic economics, agricultural and environmental economics, evaluation of environmental effects, well-being and poverty, health and inequality. He has currently worked with the socioeconomic impacts of internal migration, the impacts of pandemics on health and economy,  the evaluation of climate resilience strategies for family farming, the impacts of land-use changes and agroforestry.

Raphael Nishimura (Ph.D. in Survey Methodology, University of Michigan) is the Director of Sampling Operations of the Survey Research Operations (SRO) within the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR). He has been working with sampling and survey statistics for over ten years. His main research interest includes sampling methods, survey nonresponse and adaptive/responsive designs. He is also the director of the Sampling Program for Survey Statisticians of the SRC Summer Institute for Survey Research Techniques.  

Abigail Weitzman (Ph.D. in Sociology, New York University) is an assistant professor in the department of Sociology, a faculty research affiliate of the Population Research Center, and a research affiliate at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She completed a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. Prior to completing her Ph.D. she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru and Belize and worked as an intern at the United Nations Development Fund for Women.