Aiello and Albrecht elected as Carolina Population Center fellows
December 2, 2014
Allison Aiello, PhD, professor of epidemiology, and Sandra Albrecht, PhD, assistant professor of nutrition, both at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, have been elected as faculty fellows of the Carolina Population Center (CPC).
The CPC is a community of outstanding scholars and professionals associated to create new knowledge about population size, structure and processes of change; develop new sources of data to support population research; train the next generation of scholars; and disseminate findings and data to population professionals, policy makers and the public. CPC faculty members and students address population issues in 85 countries, as well as across the U.S. and across North Carolina.
CPC now has 64 fellows, based in 15 departments, who conduct interdisciplinary and collaborative population research, teach population-relevant classes, and mentor students preparing to research population issues.
Aiello, who received her doctorate in epidemiology from Columbia University, focuses upon the epidemiologic and mechanistic link between social factors, infectious agents, immune response, and the development of chronic diseases of aging. Her research examines life-course exposure to persistent infections and their influence on aging, immunity and health.
She is principal investigator for an intergenerational study of socioeconomic and cultural determinants of health among Latinos living in the U.S. and a study examining the impact of stress and infection on telomeres using data from the U.K. Whitehall II study. She also has led intervention studies aimed at testing non-pharmaceutical measures for reducing infections in the community setting, using clustered and social network randomized study designs.
At the national level, she serves as a member of the Social Sciences and Population Studies B Study Section at the National Institutes of Health and was a member of an Institute of Medicine panel for the Committee on Personal Protective Equipment for Healthcare Workers During an Influenza Pandemic. She has served on the editorial board of the American Journal of Infection Control and as an associate editor of BMC Public Health.
Albrecht is a social epidemiologist whose research focuses on the socioeconomic, cultural and environmental factors that contribute to progression of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease in U.S. immigrants, and among Latinos in the U.S. and in Latin America. Examples of her recent work include examining the association between intergenerational educational mobility and body mass index in adulthood among young immigrants; investigating the social and environmental determinants of weight gain in Hispanics and Chinese immigrants; and exploring the role of ethnic enclaves in shaping diet-related outcomes in Hispanics.
Her most recent work focuses on investigating social and behavioral factors that contribute to Hispanics’ increased susceptibility to insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. She has expertise in quantitative methods and has worked with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), and the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL).
Her previous experience includes working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and on international projects in Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Malawi, and Zambia. She received her doctorate in epidemiological sciences from the University of Michigan and was a postdoctoral scholar at CPC from 2011 until 2014.