New Faculty Fellows

Fall 2004, Volume 26, Number 2

This fall IPR welcomes three new faculty fellows, representing the departments of anthropology, communication studies, and human development and social policy. All were previously IPR faculty associates.

Emma Adam
Assistant Professor of Human Development and Social Policy
PhD,Child Psychology, University of Minnesota, 1998

A developmental psychologist, Emma Adam has been with Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy since 2000. She is particularly interested in how factors such as work, school, and others influence levels of stress, health, and well-being in parents and their children. She is trying to trace the pathways by which stress can lead to poor health outcomes and affect children’s behavioral, cognitive, and emotional development.

In the Family Stress Study, part of the Sloan Family Study, she explores factors that increase or decrease stress hormone levels in children and parents as they go about their everyday lives. She uses a noninvasive method—measuring the stresssensitive hormone cortisol in saliva—and daily journal entries to gauge the psychological and physiological states of the mothers, fathers, and children throughout the day.

She found that cortisol levels were lower, indicating lower stress levels, when parents felt productive, engaged, and challenged. This frequently occurred at work. Both parents and adolescents had higher stress hormone levels when they felt negative emotions such as worry and anger. Kindergartenaged children had higher stress hormone levels when they lived in a home that had high levels of conflict between parents and low levels of maternal involvement and warmth. Adam is exploring the long-term implications of these differences in cortisol levels.

Adam recently received a five-year W. T. Grant Scholars Award from the foundation of the same name to promote the careers of promising junior faculty.

Eszter Hargittai
Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology
PhD,Sociology, Princeton University, 2003

Before joining Northwestern in 2003, Eszter Hargittai was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.

Hargittai’s research focuses on the social and policy implications of information technologies. Her most recent project, Inequalities in Accessing Information Online, explores differences in people’s ability to use the Web effectively and efficiently. Based on in-person observations and interviews with 100 randomly selected Internet users in a New Jersey county, she looked at differences in people’s Web-use skills. She also examined how particular forms of content organization online influence what information is most accessible to users on the Web.

In a related project, Gender Differences in Actual and Perceived Skills, Hargittai examines new data on Web-use skill to test empirically if there are differences in men’s and women’s actual and perceived abilities to navigate online content. In the future, she also wishes to explore this question with respect to other types of skills. She is collaborating with Steven Shafer of Princeton University on the project.

She has appeared in popular media outlets (Wall Street Journal, Wired, CNNfn) and written on how the use of social network methods might aid in the empirical study of globalization.

Hargittai will receive the National Communication Association’s 2004 G. R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award for “How Wide a Web? Inequalities in Accessing Information Online” in November.

Thomas McDade
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
PhD, Anthropology, Emory University, 1999

Following a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Thom McDade arrived at Northwestern University in 2000. His research centers on population-level, integrative perspectives on health and human development, medical anthropology, ecological immunology, and stress.

Using whole blood samples taken from a finger prick, McDade analyzes multiple “biomarkers” for indications of stress, immune function, and cardiovascular disease. He has applied these methods to study the mental and physical health consequences of rapid culture change in indigenous populations in the Philippines, Samoa, Bolivia, and Kenya. For him, this is a more reliable, noninvasive way to assess the impact of social, economic, and cultural processes on human physiology and health.

McDade is also collaborating with colleagues at the University of Chicago to investigate the social, economic, and psychological correlates of healthy aging. The Laboratory for Human Biology Research at Northwestern, which he directs, is measuring blood samples for markers of immune function and cardiovascular disease risk to examine the biological impact of social processes associated with aging.

McDade received a 2002 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in a White House ceremony on May 4.