Four Fine Fellows
IPR welcomes four new scholars

Winter 2008 , Volume 30, Number 1

Alberto Palloni
Board of Trustees Professor in Sociology
PhD, Sociology, University of Washington, 1977

A specialist in population health and ethnic disparities, Palloni comes to Northwestern with a broad and distinguished track record of scholarship. One of his main lines of inquiry is investigating the relationship between early health status and social stratification and inequality, in addition to health and mortality and the resulting disparities among ethnic groups in the United States. In other regions of the world such as Latin America and Africa, he examines aging and mortality. Palloni is also recognized for his development and application of mathematical and statistical models. He is particularly well known for his role in describing the devastating consequences of HIV/AIDS on family structure in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s.

Palloni, who was appointed as one of Northwestern’s highly esteemed Board of Trustees professors, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a National Institutes of Health Merit Scholar, and a past president of the Population Association of America. He has served as a consultant for such organizations as the United Nations, World Bank, and U.S. Department of Commerce.

Victoria DeFrancesco Soto
Assistant Professor of Political Science
PhD, Political Science, Duke University, 2007

Political scientist DeFrancesco Soto’s work focuses on campaigns and elections from the viewpoint of how cognition and affect shape the processing of political information within a dynamic political environment of changing racial and ethnic demographics. Her research examines the influence of social group identity on political behavior, in particular on campaigns, black-Latino intergroup relations, comparative race studies, and attitudes toward immigration.

DeFrancesco Soto also conducts research on campaign media effects. She and Jennifer Merolla of Claremont Graduate University were the first to publish a study on the role of Latino-angled campaign advertisements on electoral behavior in 2006. Other research projects include an examination of how Latinos evaluate co-ethnic candidates and how Latino growth is changing race relations in the new South.

Jeremy Freese
Professor of Sociology
PhD, Sociology, Indiana University, 2000

Freese, who completed a two-year fellowship as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at Harvard University in June, conducts research on the connections between biological, psychological, and social processes—especially in how large-scale social or technological changes alter them.

Freese’s work evaluates different prospective contributions of evolutionary psychological and behavioral genetics to social science. In addition, he explores policy solutions that emphasize individual informed choice—such as the Medicare prescription drug benefit (Part D)—examining how such solutions might lead to differences in how much people benefit from them.

Freese also studies ways of improving data collection and methodology in the social sciences. He has written on how to better analyze large-scale surveys, proposed new standards for replication in sociology, demonstrated theoretical and measurement problems with the Ryff six-factor model of psychological well-being, and co-wrote one of the first books on how to interpret and use Stata software.

Sergio Urzúa
Assistant Professor of Economics
PhD, Economics, University of Chicago, 2007

Economist Sergio Urzúa’s research focuses on the role of uncertainty and cognitive and noncognitive abilities as determinants of schooling decisions, labor market outcomes, and social behavior. His research in econometrics is concerned with estimating selection models with unobserved heterogeneity.

In recent research, he and economists James J. Heckman, the 2000 Nobel laureate in economics, and Jora Stixrud of the University of Chicago challenge the view that cognitive ability, as measured on tests, fully explains personal achievement. They find evidence that noncognitive skills such as motivation, persistence, and self-esteem have as much influence on outcomes for schooling, wages, and employment as cognitive ability.

For more information about these and other IPR faculty fellows, go to: www.northwestern.edu/ipr/people/faculty.html