Daniel A. Powers

Daniel A. Powers is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, affiliated with the College of Liberal Arts. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and serves as a statistical computing programmer specializing in Stata and R.

• Education: Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison

His research focuses on health disparities, particularly the Hispanic infant mortality paradox and race/ethnic comparisons in infant mortality trends. Methodologically, he explores survival modeling, regression decomposition, and age-period-cohort (APC) analysis. Recent work examines maternal age effects on infant survival and racial differences in birth outcomes using decomposition techniques.

He has contributed to statistical methodology by developing algorithms for demographic analysis, including the HAZDCMP and MVDCMP Stata modules. His publications span topics like contraceptive access in Texas, maternal health, and social determinants of health risks in older adults.

Currently, he teaches courses such as:

• SOC 317L: Intro to Social Statistics
• SOC 385K: Sociological Statistics: Discrete Multivariate Models
• SOC 386L: Sociological Statistics: Dynamic Modeling/Longitudinal Data Analysis

He is affiliated with the Population Research Center and the Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation, and previously served as graduate advisor in the MS in Statistics program (2006–2012).