Lauren Gaydosh

Lauren Gaydosh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Her research focuses on the life course determinants of population health disparities from a biosocial perspective, integrating social, contextual, and biological data to understand how social inequalities impact health outcomes across the lifespan. She holds a PhD in Sociology, Demography, and Social Policy from Princeton University (2015).

Dr. Gaydosh’s work emphasizes early life environments, epigenetic mechanisms, and structural factors such as race and socioeconomic status. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the US Fulbright Program. Key themes include biological aging, health disparities in cognitive and metabolic outcomes, and the social determinants of mental health and despair. She has contributed to studies on the long-term effects of childhood interventions, Medicaid expansion impacts, and cross-national health comparisons between Britain and the U.S.

Her publications explore topics like telomere length in children exposed to material hardship, molecular risk factors for chronic diseases, and the role of despair in predicting mortality and self-destructive behaviors. She has also examined how institutional contexts, such as schools and colleges, differentially affect health outcomes across racial groups. Dr. Gaydosh’s interdisciplinary approach bridges sociology, epidemiology, and molecular biology to address pressing public health challenges.