Nazar Khalid - Floods, Community Infrastructure and Children's Heterogeneous Learning Losses in Rural India

Nazar is a fifth-year joint PhD student in Demography and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include social stratification, mobility, education, health, environment, social policy and South Asia. Nazar grew up in the Indian states of Bihar and Maharashtra, and studied Economics at Hindu College and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.  Nazar is also a research fellow at r.i.c.e, a non-profit research organization dedicated to understanding the lives of poor people in India, and to promoting their well-being. With r.i.c.e., he has conducted research on different dimensions of social level wellbeing, including health and wellbeing of children, social inequality, and sanitation. His work has been published in academic and policy journals. Nazar was awarded the Inaugural Presidential PhD Fellowship in 2021.

Kathryn O’Neill - Comparing Eight Approaches to Poverty Measurement in Terms Of Their Relevance To Wellbeing

Kathryn Kay O’Neill is a Ph.D. student in sociology and demography at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests focus on poverty, intergenerational mobility, and quantitative methodology and measurement, particularly on topics which can be applied to inform public policy. She has worked as a policy analyst at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, and holds a Masters of Public Policy from UC Riverside and a Bachelor’s degree in Community and Regional Development with a minor in Linguistics from UC Davis

Sukie Yang - Flood Induced-Migration in Regional Urban Centers in South and Southeast Asia: Findings from Mobile Phone Data

"Sukie Xiuqi Yang is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and Demography and an MA student in Statistics and Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She has conducted research on the sociology of education, child development, and social stratification. She is also developing her dissertation project investigating climate education globally.

Yang has studied the effects of parental migration on child health and cognitive growth in China. She developed a causal framework to study migration as a time-varying process and revealed more nuanced relationships between the timing and duration of repeated parental outmigration and early childhood development. Yang has presented these works at academic conferences, and they are currently being revised and resubmitted for journal publications.  In addition, Yang is examining the intersection of climate risk, environmental hazards like air pollution, and education. She collaborated on a paper linking demographic data and pollution estimates in South China. She also co-proposed a project for UNESCO analyzing climate hazards and children's schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the findings resulting from the project are featured in the policy paper of UNESCO, “Education for Climate Change: Learning to Act for People and Planet” (forthcoming at COP28).
Currently, Yang is developing her dissertation to analyze how the inclusion of climate change in the national curriculum impacts students’ environmental literacy and behaviors globally. Using international datasets, she will examine the relationships between climate education and student outcomes across cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions.

Katelyn Kim - Educational Expansion and Trends in Education Wealth Gap in South Korea

I am a PhD student in Sociology and Demography at the University of Pennsylvania, broadly interested in quantitative research of inequality, social stratification, gender and migration. My current projects look at mobility and stratification across generations and by migration status. During my graduate studies, I have been a part of various research projects, looking at long term effects of single-sex high schools, attitudes towards immigrants and immigration, health inequalities, as well as adolescent social networks. Prior to joining the PhD program at Penn, I studied at Ewha Womans University where I received an MA in Sociology. I also hold a BS in Hotel Administration from Cornell University.

Magdalena Delaporte - Occupational Trajectories and Cognitive Function in Chilean Older Adults

Magdalena Delaporte is from Santiago, Chile and holds a BA in Economics and a Master's in Economic Analysis, both from the University of Chile. Prior to becoming a PhD student, she was a researcher at the Center for Longitudinal Studies at the Catholic University of Chile, where she coordinated the research team and worked in statistical and econometric analysis. She has been part of projects related to poverty, income, health and well-being and surveys such as the Chilean National Migration Survey, Chilean National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey and the Demographic, Aging and Health Survey, among others.   She is a current member of the Chile Cognitive Aging Study (Chile-Cog), a research collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and the Catholic University of Chile. This project is designed to estimate cognitive function among Chilean adults ages 60 and above and its life-course determinants. She is interested in studying how socioeconomic, cultural and environmental factors affect health and well-being. 

Paola Rueda Guevara - Socioeconomic, Educational, Gender, and Age Disparities in Overweight in Colombia

Paola  Rueda Guevara is a nutritionist who holds a master's degree in epidemiology and public health from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and has furthered her expertise with a postgraduate course in public policy analysis from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She has professional experience in conducting public health research projects, specifically focusing on matters related to maternal and child nutrition and public policy analysis. She has led health research projects on breastfeeding, food security, and health disparities in Colombia, and her publications span food security, obesity in adults, undernutrition in children, and SARS-CoV-2 infection. Her research contributions have been acknowledged with awards, including being a Vital Strategies Healthy Food Policy Fellowship and being awarded second place in the XXXV Congress on Advances in Metabolism and Clinical Nutrition in Colombia. Her commitment to the fight against health inequalities has allowed her to actively participate in projects aimed at reducing health and nutrition gaps in the population. She has been actively involved in various roles as a Consultant, Public Policy Analyst, and nutritionist focused on Food and Nutritional Security. Paola’s research interests include overweight, obesity, Population Dynamics in nutrition and migration, social determinants of health, and Non-Communicable Diseases.