Alison Buttenheim comes to CHW from the University of California, Los Angeles where she recently completed her Ph.D. in public health. She also completed demography training at the California Center of Population Research. Her research focuses broadly on health and development, with a particular focus on maternal-child health in vulnerable settings. Recent projects include an evaluation of an experimental school feeding intervention in Laos, analyses on the health impacts of the 1998 floods in Bangladesh, and an assessment of a hygienic latrine program in a Bangladesh slum community.  Other areas of research interest include: forced migration, infectious disease and climate change, and tobacco control in developing countries. Alison holds an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a BA from Yale University.

Noël Cameron is a Human Biologist specialising in the growth and development of children with special reference to those in developing countries. After receiving a PhD in Medicine from London University he undertook research in normal and abnormal growth at the Hospital For Sick Children, Great Ormond Street and the Institute of Child Health, University College London. Between 1984 and 1997 he undertook research in South Africa initiating the Birth to Twenty birth-cohort study in Soweto and Johannesburg in 1991. His research interests include the relationship between social and economic transition and child growth particularly the childhood determinants of risk factors for obesity and the metabolic syndrome. He is currently working on the nutritional transition during adolescence, factors affecting the timing and duration of pubertal development amongst African urban children, and the causes of increased risk for non-communicable diseases of lifestyle amongst south Asians in the UK.

Brent Field joins both CHW and the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior (CSBMB) again this year as a post-doctoral researcher. Brent Field's current research interests are in the neuroscience of meditation and well being. Previous research has spanned various topics in mathematics, computer science, human-computer interaction, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. He received a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Oregon in 2000. He subsequently did research and program management at Microsoft before moving to Princeton.

Jenny Higgins
Post-doctoral Research Associate
e-mail: jennyh@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-6961
Office: 218 Wallace Hall

Jenny Higgins researches sexuality and sexual pleasure-seeking, particularly how they influence contraceptive use, unintended pregnancy, and HIV risk.  She also explores how gender, social class, and other social inequalities shape public health notions about sexual health: namely, how controllable and alterable certain people's sexual behaviors are compared to others.  She comes to the CHW from a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University's HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies.  Jenny has also worked and interned at a number of health agencies, including the Guttmacher Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ipas, and the Academy for Education Development.  She completed postdoctoral training in HIV/AIDS and Sexuality at Columbia University in 2007.  In 2005, she received her PhD in Women’s Studies and an MPH in Global Health from Emory University.

Margot Jackson is a Post-doctoral Fellow with the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Well-Being.  She is a sociologist and demographer with interests in social stratification, health and child well-being.  Specifically, she is interested in understanding how the relationship between health and social status evolves over the life course and across generations.  Her work examines the social causes and consequences of health inequalities among children and young adults, and the broader role that health disparities play in generating social inequality intragenerationally and maintaining it intergenerationally.  Using several U.S. and British data sources, she has studied children's neighborhood context, the role of education in explaining links between early-life health and adult social status, and the timing of children's exposure to poor health and socioeconomic disadvantage.  She has a BA in community health from Brown University, and an MA and PhD in sociology from UCLA.

Joanna Kempner
Research Associate
e-mail: @princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-6971
Office: Wallace Hall

Joanna Kempner joins the CHW for a second year as a Post-doctoral Research Associate. She came to the CHW from the University of Michigan where she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy and holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research investigates the intersection of gender with medicine and health and science policy. At present, she is writing a book manuscript on migraine that examines the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. She is also completing a long-term project on the politicization and suppression of controversial NIH-funded health research.

Ingrid le Roux
Visiting Senior Research Scholar
e-mail: ile@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-8276
Office: 326 Wallace Hall

Ingrid le Roux is a Swedish physician who has spent most of her professional life working in Africa. She is the medical director of a non governmental child health organization operating in the informal settlements on the outskirts of Cape Town. Her work focuses on the medical care and nutrition rehabilitation of malnourished children and the treatment and care of HIV positive women and children. She was part of a team formulating child health and nutrition policies for the new democratic South African government.  Ingrid, in cooperation with researchers from the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, in a South African study, has been assessing the impact of poverty on health and evaluating an outreach child health and nutrition intervention program.

Bruce McEwen's laboratory research deals with the impact of stress and stress hormones on the brain and on immune function. His and his laboratory colleagues also study sex differences and sex hormone, especially estrogen, effects on the brain, particularly those effects that are "non-reproductive". This work has led to a realization that stress hormone effects are biphasic---protective in the short run and potentially damaging in the long run. Hence the title of his seminal New England Journal of Medicine paper on allostatic load published in 1998. The work of his laboratory also points to the importance of studying gender differences in many of these effects.

Jason Riis is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Stern School of Business, New York University.  At CHW he is a Research Collaborator continuing his work on cross-national differences in well-being with Professor Daniel Kahneman.  He also conducts research on adaptation to health and consumption, the use and perception of enhancement technologies, and the relationship between time use and well-being.  From 2003 to 2006 he was a Post-doctoral Research Associate with the CHW. He received a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2003.

Janet's current area of research is on the psychology of healthcare decisions with a particular interest in how people behave as consumers in the healthcare domain. Her primary project at the Center for Health and Well-being is studying psychological and economic barriers to medical benefits uptake among University employees. Ph.D., in Cognitive Psychology, 2003.

Eric Verhoogen is an economist working at the intersection of development, labor and trade economics. His main area of research is industrial development, the microeconomics of the industrial sectors of developing countries. Some of his recent work has focused on how Mexican manufacturing firms have responded to ongoing international integration, and the consequences for labor market outcomes. He is currently interested in expanding that focus to include the consequences for broader measures of well-being. He is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Economics and of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard, a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD from UC Berkeley.

Joachim Voth
Visiting Research Scholar
e-mail: hansvoth@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-7386
Office: 353 Wallace Hall

Joachim Voth is ICREA Research Professor of Economics and Economic History at the Economics Department, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He obtained a Ph.D. from Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1996 and a M.Sc. from St. Antony's College, Oxford, in 1993. He has held visiting appointments at Stanford, MIT, and NYU-Stern, and has published a book with Oxford University Press as well as, inter alia, in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Economic History, and the Journal of Economic Growth. He has interests in the long-run economic development and growth, the effect of cognitive development on economic outcomes, and the history of stock market bubbles and speculation.