Leadership Team
Sarah Burgard
Director, PDHP Administrative Core
Burgard is the Director of the Populations Studies Center, and a professor in the Departments of Sociology, Epidemiology, and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Her research interests focus on the way systems of stratification and inequality impact the health of people and populations. She currently studies racial/ethnic and gender-based disparities in working conditions and occupational careers, the effect of these inequalities on health, and the impact of an individual’s working life on the well-being of other family members. She also examines racial/ethnic and socioeconomic determinants of children’s health in South Africa and Brazil.
Erin B. Ware
Director, PDHP Development Core
Ware is an assistant research professor in the Institute for Social Research, Survey Research Center. She earned her PhD in Epidemiological Sciences from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor in 2014 with a certificate in genetic epidemiology. She is a faculty affiliate at the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging and the Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Center. Her research program includes integrating genomics and social data on a large scale to evaluate health disparities and minority health. She is particularly interested in genomic correlates and gene-environment interactions in the mental health of adolescents and young adults. She was a National Institutes of Health National Institute on Aging Butler-Williams scholar in 2017 and often sits on National Institutes of Health grant review panels.
Brady T. West
Director, PDHP Scientific-Technical Core
West is a research associate professor in the Survey Methodology Program, located within the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research. He earned his PhD in Survey Methodology from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2011. His current research interests include the implications of measurement error in auxiliary variables and survey paradata for survey estimation, survey nonresponse, interviewer effects, and multilevel regression models for clustered and longitudinal data. He is the lead author of a book comparing different statistical software packages in terms of their mixed-effects modeling procedures (Linear Mixed Models: A Practical Guide Using Statistical Software, Second Edition, Chapman and Hall/CRC Press, 2014), and he is a co-author of a second book entitled Applied Survey Data Analysis (with Steven Heeringa and Pat Berglund), the second edition of which was published by Chapman and Hall in 2017.
Jeffrey D. Morenoff
Steering Committee member
Morenoff is a professor in the Department of Sociology, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and the Institute for Social Research. His research straddles the fields of sociology, demography, and criminology. One of his current lines of inquiry examines the influence of the criminal justice system on the health and wellbeing of people with criminal records, including the challenges people face as they move from prison to the community. Another line of research explores how neighborhood environments and the process of neighborhood change influence the health and wellbeing of residents. In 2014, he was recognized in Thomson Reuters’ list of Highly Cited Researchers, a distinction given to those whose work has been officially designated by Essential Science Indicators as ranking among the top 1 percent most cited for their subject field and year of publication.
Jiashu Zhao
Steering Committee member
Jiashu Zhao is a statistician and data scientist for the PDHP Scientific & Technical Core. Zhao earned his master’s degree in Statistics from North Carolina State University in 2022, and has more than 4 years’ experience with statistical project work in the fields of medicine and insurance. He has expertise in the analysis of complex survey data (using R, Python, and SAS), including data cleaning, hypothesis testing, modeling, sampling, and prediction. Zhao is interested in time series analysis, clinical trials, and statistical methods of social research.
Melissa Wallace
Research Administrator Lead
Melissa Wallace is the Research Administrator Lead of the Administrative Core serving the Population Studies Center (PSC), the Center for Political Studies (CPS) and the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD). She specializes in pre- and post-award activity for sponsored research. Melissa also assists with the PDHP P2C Center grant, managing all financial aspects of the center grant, working with the center core leads on setting up awarded seed and pilot projects, consulting with new investigators and mentees, and providing administrative support training and assisting junior affiliates in developing and submitting proposals.