Website URL: http://www.pophealth.wisc.edu/rwjscholars/scholars.htm(link is external)

Rachel is currently an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and a faculty affiliate of the Center on Race, Religion, and Urban Life. Rachel's research focuses on racial and ethnic health disparities and family influences on health behaviors and outcomes. Following her graduate work, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received training in interdisciplinary population health. Current work examines the relationship between cultural factors and risk perception during pregnancy and how the determinants of the timing of first births in the U.S. have shifted over the past 40 years. Other projects examine the relationship between maternal employment and breastfeeding initiation and duration, racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic gradients for health outcomes and behaviors, and the influence of family structure and relationship quality on prenatal health behaviors. Ph.D. Dissertation: Intergenerational Differences in Health Behaviors for Mexican-Americans: The Role of Culture and Cohesion