Claire Yang

Duda Family Professor

Research Interests

Demography, medical sociology, aging and the life course, social biology, statistical methods

Subfields

Demography, Health and Medicine, Quantitative Methods, Stratification and Inequality

Profile

Google Scholar Profile

Yang Claire Yang is a demographer, medical sociologist, and social statistician conducting transdisciplinary research on population health and aging to understand how social factors affect health across the human life span. Her research aims to reveal complex patterns of social disparities in health, explicate the life course processes shaping these disparities, and test demographic, behavioral, and biological mechanisms underlying health disparities. Her active research agenda pushes new boundaries and combines advances in sociological, quantitative psychological, developmental, and biological sciences in an integrative life-course exposome framework to advance our understanding of how social exposures and life experiences "get under the skin” to manifest in health differences. Her work has been published in prestigious outlets such as Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as well as flagship journals across fields such as the American Sociological Review (ASR), American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Demography, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Sociological Methodology, American Journal of Public Health, and Journals of Gerontology. She received numerous recognitions of professional accomplishments such as major career awards at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Population Association of America (PAA), election into the honorary Sociological Research Association, and invited lectureship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She is currently working on two NIH funded projects that develop novel methodologies for coordinated analysis of multiple longitudinal datasets and investigate the roles of work and stimulating social activities in shaping cognitive aging across international settings. She is the Chair-elect for the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, a former Deputy Editor of the ASR, and has served on the Board of Directors of the PAA.