Today at Brown

The possibility of reducing health inequalities among children is at the heart of Margot Jackson’s research. As a sociologist and demographer, Jackson examines the causes and consequences of health disparities among children and the role that health plays in generating social inequality and ultimately determining one’s adult social status.

“Childhood health has implications over one’s entire life course,” Jackson said. “Poor health seems to set children back educationally, which has social consequences reaching into adulthood.”

Using longitudinal data from the United States and United Kingdom, Jackson has studied how changes in children’s neighborhood environments over time influence healthy behaviors and outcomes, and in turn, how children’s health influences socioeconomic success. She found that observing all of children’s neighborhoods, rather than just the one they live in at any one point, offers a different window into their overall exposure to disadvantage. In addition, she showed that the influence of poor childhood health on education varies across socioeconomic and racial and ethnic groups. Jackson is currently working to extend this research to the children of immigrants, “with a focus on their health trajectories and how those trajectories evolve with contextual factors over time.”

A 2002 graduate of Brown, Jackson says her undergraduate experience greatly influenced her career path. A community health concentrator, Jackson also worked for an after-school educational program for kids with sickle-cell disease and as an emergency medical technician.

“Those experiences gave me the informal understanding of how behavior, health, and educational success are formed, in part, by one’s local and family environments,” she said. “I was interested in gaining a more rigorous understanding of those relationships in hopes of informing policy debates on different intervention strategies.”

Jackson received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California–Los Angeles and is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research and Center for Health and Well-Being. She will begin teaching at Brown next fall as an assistant professor of sociology, affiliated with both the Population tudies and Training Center and the initiative in Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4).