NIH Matilda White Riley Distinguished Lecturer

Social relations and structural lag: A brave new age

Toni C. Antonucci, Ph.D.
Elizabeth M. Douvan Collegiate Professor of Psychology and Program Director and Research Professor, Institute for Social Research University of Michigan

Dr. Antonucci’s research focuses on social relations and health across the life span, including family, life span and life course development, multigenerational relations, adult development and aging, and comparative studies of social relations and health in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. She is particularly interested in how social relations optimize or jeopardize an individual’s ability to face life’s challenges. She received a Research Career Development Award and currently is funded or has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging, and several private foundations—the Fetzer Institute, The Hartford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation.

NIH Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator Awardee

E-cigarette marketing and youth experimentation

Julia Chen-Sankey, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities National Institutes of Health

Dr. Julia Chen-Sankey is a postdoctoral fellow in the Intramural Program of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). Her research broadly involves investigating the influence of flavored tobacco use and tobacco marketing exposure among tobacco-naïve youth and young adults, as well as cigar use disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations. Her first-authored papers and commentaries were featured in prominent media outlets, including CNN and The Baltimore Sun. Dr. Chen-Sankey currently serves as an advisory committee member for the Adolescent Network of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco. She previously worked as a research analyst at the Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities, Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Dr. Chen-Sankey received her Master's degree in public policy in 2012 from Johns Hopkins University and her doctoral degree in behavioral and community health in 2018 from the University of Maryland.

NIH Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator Awardee

Examining the internalizing pathway to substance use in 10 cultural groups around the world

W. Andrew Rothenberg, Ph.D.
Research Scientist Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy

Dr. Drew Rothenberg is a research scientist at the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy. He received his Ph.D. in child clinical psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Rothenberg is passionate about under-standing how maladaptive family processes and substance use can be transmitted across generations. He explores strate-gies to prevent the intergenerational transmission of these processes and implements preventative interventions in medically underserved communities that need them the most. Thus far, Dr. Rothenberg has partnered with more than 15 community providers in multiple states and three nations to implement evidence-based interventions. He also has served more than 400 children and families in clinical practice and is the author of more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters. Dr. Rothenberg's work has been funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, The Miami Children’s Trust, and the Park Foundation

NIH Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator Awardee

Skin tone and prenatal care outcomes among African-American women

Jaime C. Slaughter-Acey, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Assistant Professor, Division of Epidemiology and Community Health Member, Minnesota Population Center Faculty, Center for Leadership Education in Maternal and Child Public Health University of Minnesota

Dr. Jaime Slaughter-Acey is an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health whose work investigates the socio-environmental and psychosocial determinants of women’s and family health across the life course, with an emphasis on health equity. She received her Ph.D. in maternal and child health epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a T32 postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University. Her current research focuses on the social meaning of race and skin color and how they intersect with other aspects of social identity (e.g., gender, social class, neighborhood) to create inequalities in health and health care. Dr. Slaughter-Acey is the principal investigator for a study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to investigate the role of colorism (skin tone bias) as a social determinant of prepregnancy cardiometabolic health and birth outcomes. Her research also is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.

NIH Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator Awardee

Mind over genome: Learning one’s genetic risk for obesity changes physiology independent of actual genetic risk

Bradley P. Turnwald, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow Stanford University

Dr. Brad Turnwald is a postdoctoral research fellow in the psychology department at Stanford University. His unlikely journey from molecular biologist to social psychologist includes a Bachelor’s degree in biology from Ohio Wesleyan University, a Master’s degree in biology from Stanford University, and Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His research seeks to understand the role that American culture plays in shaping peoples’ mindsets about modern health behaviors, such as healthy eating and personalized genetic testing, and to map the downstream consequences of those mindsets on psychological processes, behaviors, and physiological health. His work has been published in such academic journals as Nature Human Behaviour, Psychological Science, and JAMA Internal Medicine and covered by such media outlets as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR.