We welcome Taylor W. Hargrove as our newest faculty member. She joins UNC as Assistant Professor of Sociology and faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Hargrove’s research seeks to uncover and explain the development of health disparities across the life course, focusing on the consequences of race, skin color, gender, and social class.
Hargrove brings an exciting research program to UNC. She is currently engaged in research that explores linkages among neighborhood contexts, individual-level characteristics, and biological measures of health in early adulthood. The goal of this work is to elucidate how macro-level environments shape the consequences of social statuses on more proximate causes of poor health. She (along with co-PI Lauren Gaydosh, former CPC postdoctoral scholar) has recently been awarded an R21 grant from the National Institutes of Health to further this line of work. Specifically, the research funded from this grant will evaluate the role of inflammatory response, immune function, and environmental incongruence in the relationship between upward social mobility and physiological functioning among a nationally representative sample of young adults.
Hargrove earned her MA and PhD from Vanderbilt University and her BA in Psychology from UNC at Chapel Hill. Her work has previously been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and her recent peer-reviewed publications appear in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and the Journals of Gerontology: Series B.