Affiliated Graduate Program Faculty

Aronczyk, Melissa

Associate Professor
School of Communication & Information

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Website: http://melissaaronczyk.com/

Melissa Aronczyk’s research examines questions at the intersection of media, politics and identity. She is the author of Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity (Oxford, 2013) and the co-editor of Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture. Current research includes a project funded by the National Science Foundation on the role of strategic information and influence campaigns on public opinion and public policy in the United States. She is a faculty fellow with the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. 

Bosk, Emily

Assistant Professor
School of Social Work

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Curriculum Vitae

Emily Bosk is an Assistant Professor of Social Work. Trained as both a sociologist and a clinical social worker, her research is at the intersection of social theory and applied practice. Broadly, her work uses rigorous social science methods to theorize how organizations and individuals understand and intervene with vulnerable children and families and to trace out the policy and practice implications of these approaches. One line of  work examines the development and implementation of new forms of standardized decision-making in child welfare and the consequences of these tools at the individual, organizational, and policy level.  Other areas of research include: issues related to the lack of integration of social service systems for families, understandings of ‘badness’ in young children and adolescents, the treatment of race in standardized decision-making tools, programs to support parent-child relationships and the development of interventions to support the reunification process in child welfare.  As a sociologist, her subfields include medical sociology and the sociology of childhood.

Britton, Dana

Director, Center for Women and Work
Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations

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Website:http://smlr.rutgers.edu/DanaBritton

Dana M. Britton is Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations and   Director of the Center for Women and Work.  She is interested in the ways organizations – historically and presently - structure and reproduce gender inequalities at work across the multiple dimensions of gender, race, class, and sexuality.  Her current project, funded by a National Science Foundation ADVANCE-PAID grant, focuses on gender and the transition between associate and full professor, particularly for university faculty in the STEM disciplines.  Her previous research has examined gender and work in sex-segregated organizations – in particular, the prison (see for example, At Work in the Iron Cage, NYU Press, 2003) - and gender and formal social control more broadly (e.g., The Gender of Crime, Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).  She is editor emerita of the journal Gender & Society (2006-2011).  Current projects at the Center for Women and Work involve technical assistance to schools to address disproportionality by gender (and other characteristics) in career and technical education, research on family friendly policies for workers such as family leave, paid sick days, and the minimum wage, leadership and mentoring programs for undergraduates and corporate women, and a partnership to study STEM education and retention issues for undergraduate women.  

Chayko, Mary

Teaching Professor of Communication and Information
Director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies
Co-Chair of the SC&I Social Media and Society Research Cluster
School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University

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Website: http://marychayko.com
Twitter: @MaryChayko

Mary Chayko (M.Ed, Counseling Psychology; M.A., Ph.D., Sociology; Rutgers University) is a Teaching Professor of Communication and Information and Director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies at Rutgers' School of Communication and Information (SC&I) and former Professor of Sociology at the College of Saint Elizabeth. Her research explores the impact of the internet and digital technology on society, self and identity in the digital age, tech access and inequality, and the use of digital technologies in education. It has contributed to current understandings of the reality of the online experience, the intersection of the online and the offline, and opportunities for and consequences of digital social connectedness. Her book Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media and Techno-Social Life (Sage Publications now in its second edition), is a broad-based interdisciplinary primer on technologically mediated communication and society rooted primarily in the fields of sociology, psychology, and communication. She is also the author of Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age and the award-winning social science bestseller Portable Communities: The Social Dynamics of Online and Mobile Connectedness, both with SUNY Press, and many published articles. Dr. Chayko is a participant in the "public sociology" movement and has co-edited (with Corey Dolgon) the anthology Pioneers of Public Sociology: Thirty Years of Humanity and Society. Honored with the Rutgers University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributors to Undergraduate Education, Dr. Chayko directs and teaches in the SC&I Digital Communication, Information & Media program and Gender & Media programs and is known for using social media in her classes in innovative ways.

Cohen, Ira

Associate Professor
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Office: Hill Hall, 621, Newark
Office Phone: 732-445-4047 & 732-122-5422

Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches Sociology in the Graduate Program and teaches his undergraduate courses on the faculty in Sociology at Rutgers in Newark. His Graduate Program courses include classical and contemporary social theory. His research interests include the sociology of everyday life, contemporary and classical social theory, the sociology of modernity, and the history of social thought. His new book Solitary Action is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Read more: Cohen, Ira

Crystal, Stephen

Associate Director for Health Services Research
Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research
Board of Governors Professor, School of Social Work

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Website: http://socialwork.rutgers.edu/Faculty/StephenCrystal.aspx

Dr. Crystal is Board of Governors Professor of Health Services Research; Associate Director for Health Services Research; and Chair of the Division on Aging and AIDS Research Group at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research. At the Institute he directs the Center for Health Services Research and the AHRQ-funded Center for Education and Research on Mental Health Therapeutics (CERTs), a federally-funded center that develops and analyzes evidence on safe and judicious use of psychotropic medications. Dr. Crystal's research interests focus on mental health services; safety and effectiveness of prescription medication; children's mental health; Medicaid policy; quality improvement; and other areas of health policy and pharmacoepidemiology has had national impact. He is a frequent adviser to federal and state health agencies, congressional committees and foundations, and has served on many NIH and AHRQ study sections and advisory committees. His more than 300 research articles, books and reports have been extensively cited both by researchers and in federal and state policy documents, and have been referenced by more than 7900 papers in the scientific and medical literature. Dr. Crystal's recent work includes directing a major FDA/AHRQ funded multicenter study of comparative safety and effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs in children, adults and the elderly, and a study for the Institute of Medicine on ADHD diagnosis and treatment. Dr. Crystal's work in comparative safety also includes the development of consensus treatment guidelines for maladaptive aggression in youth, and external review of Texas' prescribing parameters for foster care youth. This year, Dr. Crystal became the first investigator in New Jersey to be awarded a grant from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), for a 3-year, 4-state study on "Comparative Effectiveness of State Psychotropic Oversight Systems for Children in Foster Care."

DiTomaso, Nancy

Distinguished Professor of Management and Global Business
Rutgers Business School—Newark and New Brunswick

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Website: http://www.business.rutgers.edu/faculty-research/directory/ditomaso-nancy

Nancy DiTomaso is Distinguished Professor of Management and Global Business at Rutgers Business School—Newark and New Brunswick. Her research addresses issues of diversity, culture, and inequality, as well as the management of knowledge-based organizations, and the management of scientists and engineers. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Wisconsin Madison, and she previously taught at New York University and Northwestern University. She also has a Certificate in Business Administration from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and attended Proyecto Linguistico in Quetzeltenango, Guatemala.

Her 2013 book, The American Non-dilemma: Racial Inequality without Racism (NY: Russell Sage) won the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (75 books nominated) and the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Distinguished Book Award (17 books nominated) from the American Sociological Association. The book also received Honorable Mention for the Max Weber Award for Best Book given by the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section of the ASA (2nd of 32 books nominated) and was Runner Up for the George R. Terry Award given by the Academy of Management for the Best Book in Management over a two-year period (2nd of 65 books nominated). She has co authored or co edited five other books and has had articles published in such journals as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Annual Review of Sociology, Research in Organizational Behavior, Leadership Quarterly, California Management Review among other journals. She has received grant support from the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Labor among others. In addition to the interviews for her book, she has collected survey data on a 100 innovation teams from 29 companies and on the career experiences of 3200 scientists and engineers from 24 major companies.

She has been elected to several national offices in professional associations, including a position on the American Sociological Association Council, as President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio Economics, and as Chair of the Organizations and Occupations Section and of the Economic Sociology Section of the ASA. She served as chair of the Department of Management and Global Business for twelve years, as Doctoral Director for the Ph.D. in Management Program for two years, and as Vice Dean of Faculty and Research for two and a half years.

In addition to research and teaching, Professor DiTomaso has conducted workshops, offered seminars, conducted survey research, and provided other professional services on a consulting basis for major corporations and public agencies.

Guarnaccia, Peter

Professor, Culture and Health
Department of Human Ecology
Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research

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Websites: http://www.ihhcpar.rutgers.edu/about_us/members.asp?i=16&v=2;
http://humanecology.rutgers.edu/faculty.asp?fid=31

Professor Peter Guarnaccia teaches undergraduate courses in Social and Ecological Aspects of Health and Disease, Culture and Health, and Health in the Latino Community. His research interests include cross-cultural patterns of psychiatric disorders, cultural competence in mental health organizations, and processes of cultural and health change among Latino immigrants. He has examined mental health among Latino individuals in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico for two decades, most recently using the National Latino and Asian American (NLAAS) mental health study funded by National Institute of Mental Health. He currently directs one of the International Service Learning Programs on Culture and Community Health in Oaxaca, Mexico. His most recent research, funded by NICHD, examines acculturation processes among immigrant students both to understand how students successfully balance family and U.S. cultures to get to college and what families, schools, communities, and universities can do to support immigrant students' educational aspirations.

Katz, Vikki

Associate Professor
School of Communication and Information

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Website: http://www.vikkikatz.com/

Vikki Katz is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Dr. Katz holds a B.A. from UCLA, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where she also held an Annenberg Foundation postdoctoral fellowship for two years.

Her research interests lie at the intersection of immigration, children and families, and media. Her primary line of research concerns immigrant family dynamics and how parent-child interactions influence their individual and collective settlement experiences. She has examined how children of Latino immigrants broker language, culture, and media for their families at home and in local schools, healthcare facilities, and social services. She has a forthcoming book on this subject, Kids in the middle: How children of immigrants negotiate community interactions for their families (Rutgers U. Press). She is currently engaged in two projects in this area. The first explores how Latino immigrant parents and their children make decisions about adopting new communication technologies (particularly broadband) into their home environments, and the opportunities and disruptions they expect these technologies to manifest in their family lives. The second is an investigation of how families of immigrant Latino, U.S.-born Latino, and African American parentage navigate the complex interactions they have within the Bronx Family Court system. Her other line of research concerns ethnic media, from both producers' and consumers' perspectives. This work has produced a co-authored book, Understanding ethnic media: Producers, consumers, and societies (Sage Publications), as well as articles on ethnic media as partners for broadband adoption in immigrant communities, and an exploration of ethnic media producers' communities of professional practice. See her website for updated information about her work.

Kumar, Deepa

Associate Professor
Departments of Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies

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Websites: http://www.deepakumar.net/Home and http://empirebytes.com/

Deepa Kumar is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle Eastern  Studiesat Rutgers University. Her work is driven by an active engagement with the key issues that characterize our era--neoliberalism and imperialism. Her first book, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike (University of Illinois Press, 2007), is about the power of collective struggle in effectively challenging the priorities of neoliberalism. Her second book titled Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Haymarket Books, 2012), looks at how the "Muslim enemy" has historically been mobilized to suit the goals of empire. She is currently working on a third book on the discourses of terrorism within the mainstream media and in the political sphere in the US. Dr. Kumar is a much sought after public speaker and has spoken at dozens of university and community forums on a range of topics: Islamophobia, Political Islam, US foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia, the Arab Spring, women and Islam etc. She has shared her expertise in numerous media outlets including BBC, NPR, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Hurriyat Daily News (Turkey), Iran Fars News (Iran), Al Arabiya (UAE), and other national and international news media outlets.

Kwate, Naa Oyo

Associate Professor
Human Ecology and Africana Studies

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Website: http://www.rna-lab.com

Naa Oyo A. Kwate is Associate Professor in the Departments of Human Ecology and Africana Studies. Previously she was Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. She is a product of the Chicago Public Schools, Carleton College (B.A., psychology) and St. John's University (Ph.D., clinical psychology). She completed post-doctoral training in cancer prevention and control at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Kwate is a recipient of a National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award (2009) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Investigator Award in Health Policy (2008). She has received research funding from the RWJF Healthy Eating Research Program and New Connections and the Department of Defense, Breast Cancer Research Program. Her research centers on determinants of African American health, with particular attention to individual level experiences of identity and inequality, and the intersection of these variables with more distal structural factors. She has conducted research on racial identity, the effects of racism on health, and neighborhood context and food environments in African American communities.

Lane, Jeffrey

Assistant Professor
School of Communication and Information

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Phone: 848-932-7525

Jeffrey Lane is an urban ethnographer who writes about the ways in which mediated communication and community come together in the life of the inner city. His research integrates face-to-face and digital fieldwork to understand how interpersonal relations and ties between people and institutions unfold over time. The Digital Street is the title and subject of his forthcoming book with Oxford University Press on the networked communication that brokers street life. The project draws on nearly five years of ethnographic research on- and offline in Harlem with a set of teenagers and the adults concerned about them. Professor Lane previously wrote a book called Under the Boards (University of Nebraska Press) on the production of race, masculinity, and popular culture in the basketball industry. Before joining the faculty at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, he received his PhD in Sociology from Princeton University and was a fellow of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Professor Lane, whose research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, is currently a Junior Fellow of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project.

Mouzon, Dawne

Assistant Professor
Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy

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Website: http://rutgers.academia.edu/DawneMarieMouzon

Dr. Dawne Mouzon (MPH, UMDNJ; M.A. and Ph.D., Rutgers University) is a  sociologist and Assistant Professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research focuses on the "race paradox in mental health," or the unexpected finding that Black Americans exhibit better mental health outcomes than Whites despite lower socioeconomic standing and greater exposure to discrimination.  Specifically, she explores whether the quantity and quality of four different social relationships (families, friends, fictive kin, and church members) explains this paradox.  In another strand of research, Dr. Mouzon examines both race and social class differences in the mental health benefits of marriage and the social-structural causes (and mental health implications) of the Black marriage decline.  She also studies race and social class differences in mental health stigma, men's mental health, and the impact of goal-striving stress on the mental health of upwardly mobile African Americans and Black Caribbeans. More information on her work can be found at: http://rutgers.academia.edu/DawneMarieMouzon.

Neponmyaschy, Lenna

Associate Professor
School of Social Work

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Website: http://socialwork.rutgers.edu/Faculty/LennaNepomnyaschy.aspx

Lenna Nepomnyaschy is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, where she teaches courses in applied regression analysis, poverty and inequality, and social policy. Her research interests are broadly focused on how poverty and inequality impact child and family health and well-being. One line of work examines the impact of social policies, particularly related to fathers and child support, on the well-being of families and children. Another line of work examines socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in child health and development. Current research projects focus on understanding the effects of nonresident fathers on children’s food insecurity and the well-being of children in immigrant families who have a nonresident father. 

O'Neill, Karen M.

Associate Professor
Department of Human Ecology

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Phone: 848-932-9208
Curriculum Vitae

Karen M. O’Neill is a sociologist who studies how policies about land and water affect government power, the status of experts, and the well-being of various social groups. She has researched biodiversity protections in the urban plans of large cities around the world, local slow growth and pro-growth movements and policies in small towns, river flood control, and coastal storm vulnerability and hazard reduction. Karen has written or co-edited books on the rise of the U.S. program for river flood control and growth of government power (Duke University Press), on race and Hurricane Katrina (Rutgers University Press), and on changes in institutions in response to Hurricane Sandy (Rutgers University Press). She is a member of teams in two international competitions for coastal resilience designs, one for the New Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy, under the Rebuild by Design competition (finalist team), and the second to use the Mississippi River to replenish coastal land in Louisiana, under the Changing Course competition (one of three winning teams).

Schoolman, Ethan D

Assistant Professor
Department of Human Ecology

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Website: https://www.ethanschoolman.org
Curriculum Vitae

Ethan D. Schoolman is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. Dr. Schoolman is an environmental sociologist whose work focuses primarily on the politics and culture of local food systems, and the implications of robust local and alternative food systems for environmental sustainability, public health, and social justice. Since coming to Rutgers, Dr. Schoolman has directed large-scale surveys of specialty crops growers in the Midwest, farmers in the Highlands region of New Jersey, and vendors at farmers markets in thirteen New Jersey counties. While working on these and other projects, Dr. Schoolman has collaborated with a number of not-for-profit groups and government agencies, including New Jersey Audubon, New Jersey Youth Corps, Elijah’s Promise, and the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Dr. Schoolman’s work has been published in journals spanning a range of disciplines, including Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Ecological Economics, Sociological Forum, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Sustainability Science.At Rutgers, Dr. Schoolman teaches on sustainable food systems, environmental politics, and research methods. He is on the graduate faculties in Sociology, Nutritional Sciences, and at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, and he is a faculty affiliate at the New Jersey Institute of Food, Nutrition, and Health.

Shwom, Rachael

Assistant Professor, Climate and Society
Department of Human Ecology

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Website: http://humanecology.rutgers.edu/faculty.asp?fid=38

Assistant Professor Rachael Shwom teaches undergraduate courses in Energy and Society, Innovative Solutions to Environmental Problems, and Environmental Politics and graduate courses in Human Dimensions of Environmental Change and the Environmental Movement. Her research interests are in environmental sociology, organizational sociology and consumption. Her research interests are in the areas of civil society organizations and societal change; the evolution and function of interorganizational networks; how social institutions structure environmentally significant-consumption; and models in the natural and social sciences. She is currently involved in projects exploring: how energy efficiency advocates decide whether to work with businesses, networks in urban watersheds; how motherhood influences environmental practices; and using social and ecological models in climate change education.