Evolving Family Theme Project
Affiliates

All Cornell faculty, staff, and students are eligible to become affiliates of the Evolving Family theme project. Affiliates receive notification of all theme project events and are listed on this webpage. To join, please send email to socialsciences@cornell.edu.

Faculty

Visiting Scholars

Students

Staff

Faculty Affiliates
Richard Burkhauser Professor & Chair Policy Analysis and Management 119A Martha Van Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-2097 rvb1@cornell.edu	Richard Burkhauser research focuses on the impact of public policy on the behavior and economic well being of vulnerable populations. He is currently looking at the impact of post secondary education on the lifetime earnings and employment of deaf students and the role Social Security Disability Insurance plays in their exit from the labor force. More generally he is looking at the trends in the employment, income and poverty rates of working age people with disabilities.
Shelley Correll Associate Professor Sociology 364 Uris Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-1697 sjc62@cornell.edu	Shelley Correll is currently conducting a research project on the "motherhood penalty." This project examines how cultural stereotypes about motherhood create barriers for mothers employed in the paid labor market.  In one recent experiment, we find that mothers are rated as less committed to their jobs and they are seen as less hireable, less promotable, and deserving of lower starting salaries compared with otherwise equal women without children.  Mothers are also held to significantly more stringent performance standards.  Fathers, by contrast, experience no such disadvantages and are,  instead often advantaged by their parental status.  Compared with childless men, fathers are rated as more committed to their jobs and deserving of higher salaries.
Rachel Dunifon Assistant Professor Policy Analysis and Management 295 Martha Van Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-6535 red26@cornell.edu	Rachel Dunifon's recent research examines the impact of welfare policies on children, as well as the influence of family living arrangements on children.  Her work in the area of welfare reform studies how changes in state welfare policies during the 1990s influenced the well-being of children, parenting behaviors towards young children, and the family structures in which children live.  She is also examining how maternal work conditions influence children.  Work on family living arrangements examines ways in which growing up in a single-parent family may influence children, and the role of grandparents in the lives of children.
Jennifer L. Gerner Professor Policy Analysis and Management 124 Martha Van Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-5969 jlg19@cornell.edu	Jennifer L. Gerner has studied the effect of expected changes in marital status on labor supply decisions. Her recent research looks at the effects on educational attainment for children of divorce. Gerner has also published on contraceptive choice among teenagers, family composition and investment in household capital, and time allocation decisions in two-parent families.
Ardyth Gillespie Associate Professor Division of Nutritional Sciences 375 Martha Van Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-2635 ahg2@cornell.edu	Ardyth Gillespie's work has contributed to the understanding of the importance of context in family food decision-making and addresses family food decision-making processes and resources including family goals, trade-offs and constraints within families and community environments.  Her current work focuses on the role of family food decision-making in mediating the relationships between community food systems and food environments and family health including food security and obesity.  She is currently working with multi-disciplinary teams to gain a holistic perspective on health issues.  Her community-based research engages community leaders and integrates research with education and action.
George Jakubson Associate Professor School of Industrial and Labor Relations 254 Ives Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-4546 gj10@cornell.edu	George Hersh Jakubson has published on welfare, female poverty and household headship, the relationship between public transfers and private interfamily transfers, and the effect of education on women's labor force participation and earnings in Ecuador. His expertise includes econometrics, human capital measurement, income distribution and security, social insurance and welfare, and evaluation of social programs and legislation.
Kara Joyner Assistant Professor Policy Analysis and Management 109 Martha Van Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-2069 kj34@cornell.edu	Kara Joyner's research addresses why individuals form and maintain relationships, including friendships, romantic relationships, cohabiting relationships, and marriages. It also concerns how individuals think, feel, and behave within relationships. She's written papers with Grace Kao addressing age decline in interracial sexual relationships and panethnicity in the friendship choices of Hispanic and Asian adolescents. She’s also conducted research with John Cawley and Jeffery Sobal on the relationship between body size (specifically, weight and height) and dating and sexual activity. Currently, she is Principal Investigator on a subproject ("The Timing and Circumstances of the Transition to Fatherhood") of an NICHD-funded project directed by Elizabeth Peters.
Dan Lichter Director, Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center and Ferris Family Professor in Life Course Studies Policy Analysis and Management 102 Martha Van Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 254-8781 dtl28@cornell.edu	Dan Lichter's research focuses on welfare incentive effects on the family.  His research has centered on the question of whether low-income unwed mothers ­ the targets of welfare reform ­ are able to marry, stay married, and “marry well.”  He has also studied the relationship between children’s changing living arrangements, especially the growing share living in single-parent and cohabiting families, and their changing economic well-being.  With Zhenchao Qian, he also is examining recent trends in assortative mating and interracial marriage and cohabitation using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Public Use Microdata Samples from the U.S. decennial censuses.
Tracy R. Nichols Assistant Professor of Public Health Weill Cornell Medical Center 411 East 69th St. New York, NY 10021 (212) 746-1270 tnichols@bway.net	Tracy Nichol's background is in adolescent development and women's health. Her research interests in the family are from the perspective of studying health practices within families. Nichols is particularly interested in health promotion strategies that can effectively increase physical activity and healthy eating, and she is currently working on several grant initiatives to develop reliable assessment tools and protocols for measuring and intervening with the health practices, needs, concerns, and contexts of urban parents and adolescents. Nichols is also interested in examining gender roles and expectations as they relate to family health practices.
Ned J. Place Assistant Professor Diagnostic Endocrinology College of Veterinary Medicine S2-068 Schurman Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 253-3796 njp27@cornell.edu	Ned Place's research focuses on female reproductive biology with an emphasis on the age-associated decline in fertility.  His research addresses life history trade-offs that are associated with the timing of hormone secretion and reproductive effort in a number of mammalian species.  Because many women first attempt to start a family at an age when a significant decline in fertility has already occurred (mid-30's to 40's), investigations are now underway to determine if certain environmental and hormonal conditions decelerate the reproductive aging process.
Christine K. Ranney Associate Professor Dept. of Applied Economics and Management 351Warren Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-3095 ckr2@cornell.edu	Christine Ranney conducts research in the broad areas of public finance and public policy issues at the local, state, federal, and international levels. Her current research focuses on the role of government programs in alleviating poverty; the determinants of the overall distribution of income in the U.S., and an investigation of the extent to which U.S. consumers meet the recommended dietary guidelines, including implications for food production, processing, and marketing if the guidelines were met.
Sharon Sassler Associate Professor Dept. of Policy Analysis and Management 134 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 254-6551 ss589@cornell.edu	Sharon Sassler's recent research explores various factors challenging the institution of marriage, focusing in particular on cohabitation and the role it serves for those choosing to live in this increasingly normative arrangement. Her recent papers have examined the factors shaping entrance into cohabiting versus marital unions and predictors of marriage or dissolution for those living with romantic partners. She is currently studying the impact of employment and earnings on cohabitors' entrance into marital unions, using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and SIPP (Survey of Income and Program Participation). Another project utilizes qualitative interviews with cohabitors to explore relationship development and how living together shapes expectations for marriage and parenting.
Anna Marie Smith Associate Professor Government 309 White Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-2708 ams3@cornell.edu	Anna Marie Smith is a social and political theorist working in the Foucauldian/Gramscian paradigm on feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and postmodern theories of ideology. She has published two books and several articles in these fields. She is currently finishing up a book-length manuscript dealing with the implications of the sexual regulation dimensions of welfare reform in the United States for contemporary theories of State power. For a full cv. please go to http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/ams3.
Raymond Swisher Assistant Professor Dept. of Policy Analysis and Management 256 MVR Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-7010 rs263@cornell.edu	Raymond Swisher's research focuses on how social contexts shape family and individual well-being during adolescence and the transition to adulthood. One set of studies uses Add Health data to examine how neighborhood and school characteristics influence adolescent well-being, as measured by educational expectations, own violence, and depression. Other research examines the concepts of the "family-friendly neighborhood" and "neighborhood - life stage fit," capturing the degree to which the neighborhoods of dual-earner families are supportive of work and family demands. Most recently, he’s collaborated with Maureen Waller, examining risk factors associated with father involvement in the Fragile Families study.
Visiting Scholar Affiliates
Chima Anyadike Visiting Associate Professor Africana Studies and Research Center Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853	Chima Anyadike is interested in the evolving family from the perspective of imaginative literature, especially fictional narratives. The womanist critique of feminist theory, for example, has something to do with the latter's pursuit of female emancipation sometimes at the expense of core family values. A number of literary texts explore the problems associated with that development.
Patrick Barclay Postdoctoral Lecturer Neurolobiology and Behavior Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853	Pat Barclay’s primary interests lie in reputation systems and the evolution of non-kin cooperation, but he has broad interests in all areas of human social evolution including family dynamics. He uses evolutionary theory to generate testable hypotheses about human behavior and the possible functional significance of different types of behavior. He will soon be conducting research on the changes in family size in response to changes in social environments.
Cynthia Bowman Visiting Professor Law School 218 Myron Taylor Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 (607) 255-2097	Cynthia Bowman is currently Professor of Law and of Gender Studies at Northwestern, where she teaches Torts, Family Law, and Feminist Jurisprudence. She has published widely in diverse areas having to do with law and women, such as women in the legal profession, sexual harassment, and legal remedies for adult survivors of childhood sex abuse. She oversaw an exchange relationship between Northwestern Law School and the University of Ghana for five years, at the end of which she published a casebook on Women and Law in Subsaharan Africa, co-authored by Akua Kuenyehia. She will teach Torts in the fall semester, along with a course on Family Law and a seminar on Feminist Jurisprudence in the spring semester.
Kristin Dale Visiting Associate Professor Dept. of Policy Analysis and Management Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853	Kristin Dale's research interests concern how household production affects labour supply and allocation of time in the household, as well as entry into higher education. Within theoretical models these effects can be shown to affect wage formation in occupations and industries where employees use household skills (thereby giving a theoretical basis for dual labor markets). Her empirical work provides support for gender differences in white and blue-collar wages consistent with those predicted by the models.
Patricia Kaurouma Visiting Associate Professor Africana Studies and Research Center Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853	Patricia Kaurouma's work explores the evolution in family forms of black families in America , since the seminal work of Robert Hills' The Strength of Black Families. Her work examines the continuing role of the black church, as the most viable institution in African America life, and undertakes to address contemporary black family social issues. She evaluates the effectiveness of the strategies and interventions utilized to sustain and enhance family units.
Len Lopoo Assistant Professor Public Administration Maxwell School Syracuse University 426 Eggers Hall Syracuse , NY 13244	Len Lopoo's research largely focuses on the influence social welfare policies have on adolescent behaviors. In one recent project, he askas if changes in welfare policies during the 1990s had any influence on the fertiliy of young women. In another line of research, Lopoo asks if government investement in children over the last forty years has altered economic mobility in the United States.
Mark Suchman Visiting Professor 304 Myron Taylor Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853	Mark C. Suchman is Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Wisconsin, Department of Sociology. His primary research interests center on the legal environments of organizational activity. From 1999 to 2001, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale University, and in 2002-2003 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California.
Student Affiliates
Gwendoline Alphonso Graduate Student Government Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 gma22@cornell.edu	Gwendoline Alphonso completed her doctorate in law from Cornell (August 2005). Her dissertation used legal history and feminist legal theory to examine the intersection between gender, laws of punishment, and society in the penal laws of 19th-century New York. In the course of her research, 'family' seemed significant as a site of social control of deviance among subordinate classes of women. She's currently developing a dissertation proposal in American Politics that studies American Political Development through the lens of the family and its relation to the growing polity and its laws, from the Revolution to the New Deal.
Ashish Bajracharya Graduate Student Policy Anaylysis and Management Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 ab377@cornell.edu	Ashish Bajracharya is a third year doctoral student concentrating in family and social welfare policy. He is currently conducting research with Prof. Rachel Dunifon on a study that examines the role of grandparents on the lives of youth. His research interests are mainly in the unintended consequences of social welfare policy on children and youth, particularly on how changes in maternal labor market conditions affect child wellbeing and how these relationships are mediated by factors like parenting behavior.
Jason Beekman Undergraduate Student Department of Government EPL Law and Society Concentration Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 jcb54@cornell.edu	Jason Beekman is an undergraduate student in the Government Department and is also a participant of the Ethics and Public Life Program's Law and Society Concentration. He has developed a special interest in the issues surrounding family, fatherhood, and social policy. Recently he has started doing independent research on the changing state of families in the United States and the subsequent policy initiatives taken by the State in response to the current "family values" debate. Before coming to Cornell he worked as a certified teaching assistant and drama director for 4 years at a Montessori school where he first nurtured an interest in the family as a dynamic social institution.
Julie Carmalt Doctoral Student Policy Analysis and Management Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 jhc48@cornell.edu	Julie Carmalt is a doctoral student in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management. Her research focuses on the demography of obesity. Currently, Julie is conducting research examining the relationship between body weight and relationship formation and relationship dynamics (e.g., cohabitation, marriage, number of sex partners, fertility, contraceptive use, sexual activity.) Additional research examines the effect of weight and body image on adolescent substance use and the effects of TANF's maternal work requirements on children's obesity.
Sarah Hertzog Graduate Student Human Development Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 smh77@cornell.edu	Sarah Hertzog is a first year graduate student in Human Development. Her research interests include child and family programs and policies. More specifically, she is interested in studying the design and evaluation of youth development programs as well as the impact of maternal/paternal employment as it relates to various aspects of child development.
Joseph Price Graduate Student Department of Economics Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 jpp34@cornell.edu	Joe Price is interested in the interaction between family structure, education, and productivity. His research looks at the determinants of the amount of time a child spends with his or her parents. His research also examines interaction between marriage, education, and job outcomes for graduate students. In the future he wants to explore the degree to which correlations between marriage and various outcomes are a selection or causal effect.
Samantha Majic Graduate Student Department of Government Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 sam232@cornell.edu	Samantha Majic is a 3rd year PhD Student in the Department of Government. Her research interests regarding the family are in marriage promotion and welfare reform in the United States, as well as in the regulation and organization of sex workers in the United States, and how this challenges their family lives.
Maximillian Schmeiser Graduate Student Policy Analysis and Management Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 mds67@cornell.edu	Maximillian Schmeiser is interested in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and how it alters the consumption, savings, and employment decisions of those eligible for the credit. His research emphasis is on how changes in the behavior of parents, brought about by the EITC, affect the cognitive development and socioeconomic achievement of their children. He is also conducting research on the New York State non-resident parent EITC supplement, and its effectiveness in increasing child support compliance and payments.
Felicia Yang Graduate Student Policy Analysis and Management Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 fty2@cornell.edu	Felicia Yang is a fourth year doctoral student, working with Liz Peters. Her research interests are family and social welfare policy, particularly in relation to U.S. immigrants. Her research focuses on family outcomes, such as family structure changes, marriage, fertility, and the well-being of children. Yang's current research is focused on the demographic consequences of welfare policy and reform among immigrants, the contexts that surround family structure transitions, and the family and policy-based determinants of well-being among immigrants.
Ning Zhang Graduate Student Policy Analysis and Management Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 nz33@cornell.edu	Ning Zhang is interested in the joint part of health economics, labor economics and family economics. Her current research looks at the interaction between family structure, wealth, and expectation during business cycles. Her research also examines the general equilibrium effects of welfare reform on the working poor at several outcomes. In the future she intends to explore the effects of health insurance on family structure.
Staff Affiliates
Janis Whitlock Senior Research Assoc. Family Life Development Center Beebee Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853	Janis Whitlock, Ph.D., MPH is a Research Associate in the Family Life Development Center.  She is the Director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behaviors and the Research and Evaluation Coordinator for the ACT for Youth Upstate Center of Excellence. Janis has a has worked in the area of adolescent and women's health and possesses formal training in Public Health and Human Development.

Learn more about the Evolving Family Theme Project.

     Contact

  socialsciences@cornell.edu

     607-255-3304

    148 Myron Taylor Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853