Jennifer Karas Montez
Professor, Sociology
Gerald B. Cramer Faculty Scholar in Aging Studies
Co-Director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab
Faculty Associate, Aging Studies Institute
Aging Studies Institute
Degree
Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 2011
Specialties
Social demography, social determinants of health, women's health, spatial patterns and trends in mortality
Personal Website
http://www.jennkarasmontez.com
Courses
SOC 101:
Introduction to Sociology
SOC 714:
Intermediate Social Statistics
SOC 800: Human Conquest of Disease & Early Death
SOC 813:
Advanced Social Statistics
Biography
Jennifer
Karas Montez received her PhD in Sociology with a Demography specialization at
the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. Afterwards she spent two years at
the Harvard School of Public Health as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health
and Society Scholar, and then two years at Case Western Reserve University as
an Assistant Professor of Sociology.
Her
research examines the large and growing inequalities in adult mortality across
education levels and geographic areas within the United States. She is
particularly interested in why the growing inequalities have been most
troublesome among women. Her current work on this topic blends perspectives
from social demography and feminist geography to investigate the role of U.S.
states in shaping women’s and men’s mortality in unique ways. In another line
of research she examines whether and why experiences in childhood, such as
poverty and abuse, have enduring consequences for health during later life.
Publications
A
sample of publications (see CV for complete list):
Jennifer
Karas Montez, Anna Zajacova, Mark D. Hayward, Steven H. Woolf, Derek Chapman,
& Jason Beckfield. 2019. “Educational Disparities in Adult Mortality across
U.S. States: How Do They Differ and Have They Changed Since the Mid-1980s?” In
press at Demography.
Jennifer
Karas Montez. 2017. “Deregulation, Devolution, and State
Preemption Laws’ Impact on U.S. Mortality Trends.” American Journal of Public Health 107(11):1749-1750.
Jennifer Karas Montez, Anna Zajacova, and
Mark D. Hayward. 2017. “Disparities in Disability by Educational Attainment
across U.S. States.” American Journal of
Public Health 107(7):1101-1108. PMCID: PMC5463211
Jennifer Karas Montez, Mark D. Hayward,
and Douglas A. Wolf. 2017. “Do U.S. States’ Socioeconomic and Policy
Contexts Shape Adult Disability?” Social
Science & Medicine 178:115-126. PMCID: PMC5388855
Jennifer Karas Montez, Anna Zajacova, and Mark D. Hayward. 2016. “Explaining
Inequalities in Women’s Mortality between U.S. States.” SSM
- Population Health 2:561-571. PMCID: PMC5049881.
Jennifer
Karas Montez, Pekka Martikainen, Hanna Remes, and Mauricio
Avendano. 2015. “Work-Family Context
and the Longevity Disadvantage of U.S. Women.” Social Forces 93(4):1567-1597. PMCID: PMC5070483
Jennifer
Karas Montez and Mark D. Hayward. 2014. “Cumulative Childhood
Adversity, Educational Attainment, and Active Life Expectancy among U.S.
Adults.” Demography 51(2):413-435.
PMCID: PMC4465758
Recent Invited Lectures
2018
“Deregulation, Devolution, and Death in
the American States.” Presented at the Social Demography Seminar Series at the
Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, the Carolina Population
Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Duke University Population Research
Institute.
2017
“Hypothesizing Upward: Have U.S.
State Policies Contributed to the Widening Inequalities in Life Expectancy?” Presented at the Department of
Sociology Colloquium Series, University at Buffalo.
“The Role of SES in Shaping Disparities
in Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife.” Invited by the Committee on Population of the National Academies of Science,
Engineering and Medicine to present at an expert meeting on “Socioeconomic Status and Increasing Mid-Life Mortality” in
Washington DC.
“U.S. States and the Health of Women.” Presented at
the 2017 Presidential Symposium on Society & Health, SUNY Upstate Medical
University, and the 2nd annual NIH Vivian W. Pinn Symposium: Putting
Science to Work for the Health of Women, Bethesda, MD.