Robert A Hummer
Robert A. Hummer is the Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Faculty Fellow of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. He served as the 2021 President of the Population Association of America; is currently a member of the Committee on Population of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
His research focuses on the accurate documentation and more complete understanding of health and mortality disparities in the United States. He is currently Director and Principal Investigator of the long-running National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Now in its sixth wave, Add Health is one of the most innovative and well-utilized nationally representative cohort studies of Americans ever undertaken and provides data for thousands of researchers to more fully understand the multi-level (biological, survey, contextual) life course factors that contribute to health and health disparities in US adolescents and adults.
Hummer has published more than 150 journal articles, book chapters, and books in his areas of interest, with attention to health disparities both during infancy/childhood as well as across the adult life course. He has developed conceptual models to better understand disparities in health/mortality and specializes in the creative and effective use of very large data sets to study US health/mortality patterns and trends. His book, Population Health in America (with Erin R. Hamilton), weaves together demographic data with social theory to provide an in-depth historical and contemporary portrait of US population health and challenges readers to examine current health policy priorities and to ask whether major shifts are needed.
His other current work includes projects that accurately document and provide a more complete understanding of racial/ethnic, educational, and gender disparities in U.S. health and mortality and that train predoctoral and postdoctoral researchers on the integration of the biological and social sciences for the more holistic understanding of life course processes of health and health disparities in the United States.