Research Team

Amanda Ajrouche is a Project Coordinator, supporting Dr. Margaret Hicken’s Work Life Study. Amanda is also working with Dr. Hicken on developing a manuscript that aims to further investigate the connnection between social factors and environmental pollution. Amanda holds an MSW from the University of Michigan School of Social Work and is dedicated to increasing research around Arab Americans.

Raynesha Franklin is a Senior Research Interviewer at Emory University. She currently holds a master’s degree in physician assistant studies and clinical research from Morehouse School of Medicine. Her interest includes sleep medicine and continuing to promote health in her community. In her free time, Raynesha enjoys traveling, watching football or basketball games, and spending time with her family and friends.

Hedy received her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. After receiving her PhD, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan from 2009 to 2011. She holds a courtesy joint appointment at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at WUSTL and is a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She currently serves on the research advisory board for the Vera Institute of Justice and the board for the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. She is also a member of The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Committee on Population. Her recent work examines the impact of structurally rooted chronic stressors on health.

Dr. Kira Birditt is a Research Professor and Director of the Aging and Biopsychosocial Innovations Program. Dr. Birditt’s program of research focuses on negative aspects of relationships, stress, and the implications of relationships and stress for health and well-being over time (using both self-reported and biological indicators of health). She is particularly interested in understanding how relationships differentially influence health and well-being depending on the context of stress. Most of her projects involve examining individuals and dyads either over time and or within families.

Ben Culp is the lead research assistant for Dr. Margaret Hicken’s WorkLife Study. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2023. Ben is particularly interested in social determinants of health outcomes.

She currently oversees projects and staff within the ABI program. Her primary responsibilities are administrative oversight of study staff and working with the staff on study recruitment and data collection. She assists the director with grant budgeting, proposals and data presentations. She has worked in research at the University of Michigan for 14 years, all in the medical school until she came to ISR in June 2022.

Dr. Courtney L. McCluney (she/her) is an award winning educator, researcher, consultant, and advisor reimagining ways to foster wellness in the workplace. Trained as a social scientist, Dr. McCluney has received several grants and recognition for her work including groundbreaking research on the factors that affect workers’ well-being and success. Her work is featured in several peer reviewed academic publications and she is a contributing writer to Forbes and the Harvard Business Review. Dr. McCluney is an assistant professor in the ILR School at Cornell University. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of Michigan and BA in Psychology and Interpersonal/Organizational Communications at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a former Research Fellow at Catalyst, Inc. and previously served as an AmeriCorps Social Impact Fellow.

Reed DeAngelis is a population health scientist. He studies how the structuring of human societies allows some groups of people to live longer, healthier lives than others. He’s also interested in understanding how different groups cope with chronic social stress, especially through religious and spiritual beliefs and practices.

Karis Hawkins is a first year graduate student in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health MPH program on the General Epidemiology track. She earned her B.S. in May 2024 from the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Public Health Sciences. She is interested in social epidemiology, examining the effects of social factors on health. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and trying out new recipes. Her specialty is baking.

Neil J. Nakkash is a research assistant on Dr. Margaret Hicken’s WorkLife Study. A graduate of the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy, Neil is interested in how national and global policies impact population health. His long-term goals include pursuing a career that engages his interests in medicine and public health. In his free time, Neil enjoys hiking and writing book reviews on Goodreads.

Michael Elliott is a Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research. He received his PhD in biostatistics in 1999 from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Michigan in 2005, he held an appointment as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and prior to that as a Visiting Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and as a Visiting Research Scientist at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Dr. Elliott’s statistical research interests focus around the broad topic of “missing data,” including the design and analysis of sample surveys, casual and counterfactual inference, and latent variable models. He has worked closely with collaborators in injury research, pediatrics, women’s health, the social determinants of physical and mental health, and smoking cessation research. Dr. Elliott has served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C and the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and as an Associate Editor and Editor of the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology. He was Associate Chair of Academic Affairs for the Department from 2018-2021.

Through her entire research program, Margaret Hicken is committed to clarifying the social causes and biological mechanisms underlying population patterns in health. The major hallmark of her research is the integration of scientific knowledge from across disciplines, as this transdisciplinary approach allows for creative and innovative insights into the root drivers of these patterns. She has built, from the ground up, a research program around my conceptual framework that integrates humanist and social science scholarship on US society to the biological literature on stress biology, molecular mechanisms, and health. For example, her research suggests that social exposures amplify the health impact of environmental exposures, providing important evidence that multiple features of American society operate together to drive population health patterns.

Bassey Enun is a Research Project Manager at Emory University. She is a US-trained physician with certified training in Advanced Clinical Research Project Management(ACR-PM), Pharmacovigilance and Drug Safety (PVDS), Advanced Clinical Research Coordination (ACRC), and Advanced Clinical Research Associate(ACRA). She is passionate about  clinical research, destroying barriers to healthcare, and empowering patients to take control of their health. She is dedicated to providing an environment where all are welcome to participate in clinical research regardless of background.

Dr. Dayna A. Johnson, PhD, MPH, MSW, MS is a sleep epidemiologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University in Atlanta GA. She also holds an academic appointment in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at Emory.  Dr. Johnson’s research is aimed at understanding the root causes of sleep health issues and their impact on health outcomes by:

1. addressing the social and environmental determinants of sleep disorders and insufficient sleep; and
2. investigating the influence of modifiable factors such as sleep disorders and disturbances in health outcomes (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, cognition).

She is funded by the National Institutes of Health to investigate associations of contextual factors and psychosocial stress on sleep and blood pressure. Dr. Johnson is also engaged in community partnerships to investigate the effect of environmental exposures and housing on health among residents of Georgia. Her mission is to increase awareness around the importance of sleep.