About Me

During the early part of my career, I was broadly interested in issues related to race and ethnicity, immigrant incorporation, and social stratification. I have now become consumed with issues pertaining to social epidemiology and global health, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, one part of my new work focuses on how expressions of HIV stigma beliefs affect sexual behaviors in Africa. Yet another part examines the relationship between the presence of older siblings and the timing of risky behaviors among African youth. While this project is now exclusively quantitative in nature, I may at some point incorporate a qualitative component, where I would seek to understand how Southern Africans’ lived meanings of stigma beliefs contribute to their private sexual behaviors. In keeping with my broad interest in sub-Saharan Africa, I will soon begin another project that examines racial and ethnic differences in the quality of neighborhoods to which South Africans move. Access to safe neighborhoods is a severely understudied social phenomenon in South Africa that has implications for the ability of various ethnic groups to attain scarce but highly desired resources. Importantly, my current work is interdisciplinary and will use literature and ideas from social psychology, public health, and sociology in the papers that emerge from it.

One's scholarly research is often related to one's personal experiences. I'm an immigrant. I was born in Jamaica and grew up in Guyana, South America, and in the Commonwealth of Dominica in the West Indies. After coming to this country, my family had to participate in the same "race to the middle class" in which all immigrants participate to one degree or another. As such, issues surrounding immigrant incorporation, social stratification, and health outcomes are deeply personal.