Each year, the Population Association of America organizes a conference for researchers, professors, and PPA members to meet, share, and learn more about different topics in population research. For 2017, the annual meeting took place April 27th-28th in Chicago, and there was no shortage of events to attend.
In addition to 252 different sessions to choose from, guests were given the opportunity to attend 11 poster sessions that contained about 100 poster presentations each. In the sea of posters, quite a few of our own Penn State Population Research Institute (PRI) directors, associates, and graduate students stood out and were awarded for their work.
Michelle Frisco, acting director of PRI and associate professor of sociology and demography; Erin (Powell) Baumgartner, PRI demography student and graduate student in the sociology program; and Jennifer Van Hook, director of PRI and professor of sociology and demography; were awarded for their poster on “Outsiders in American Schools? How Elementary School Exposure Contributes to Hispanic-White Disparities in Children’s Weight” that was presented in the “Children and Youth; Education” session category.
Another poster presented and awarded in this category was by Diane Felmlee, PRI associate and professor of sociology; Cassie McMillan, graduate student pursuing a dual-title PhD in sociology and demography; Paulina Rodis, graduate student in the sociology and criminology and demography program; and Wayne Osgood, PRI associate and professor of criminology and sociology. Their poster was “Falling off Track: The Negative Impact of School Transitions on Youth Friendship Networks and GPA From Sixth to Twelfth Grade.”
Under “Data, Methods, and Professionalization,” Christopher Fowler, PRI associate, PRI demography training program faculty, and assistant professor of geography; and Nathan Frey, a former Penn State PRI demography student and now post doc at Brown University; were awarded for their poster titled “The ‘Contextual Fallacy’ Reframed: Uncertainty in the Representatives of Census Counts for Individual Experience.”
In “Aging, Gender, Race and Ethnicity” Ashton Verdery, assistant professor of sociology and demography; and Rachel Margolis, University of Western Ontario department of sociology, received an award for their poster “Aging Alone: Older Adults without Close Kin in the United States.”
Standing out from the other “Migration, Urbanization, Population, Development, and Environment” posters was Emily Wornell’s, a dual-degree PhD candidate in rural sociology and demography, poster titled “Full-time Employment Among Latino Immigrants: Variation Across New Immigrant Destination Types.”
Congratulations to all the above-named PRI associates for their outstanding work and awards at this year’s Population Association of America meeting.