Irma Elo Named Tamsen and Michael Brown Presidential Professor in Sociology

Irma Elo, Professor of Sociology, has been appointed Tamsen and Michael Brown Presidential Professor. Elo’s main research interests center on socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, immigrant, and geographic inequalities in health and mortality across the life course and demographic estimation of mortality. In recent years, she has extended her research to include predictors of cognition in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. Elo, who also holds an appointment as a Research Associate at the Population Studies Center and the Population Aging Research Center, is currently the primary investigator of the National Institute on Aging-funded study, Causes of Geographic Divergence in American Mortality Between 1990 and 2015: Health Behaviors, Health Care Access and Migration.

Elo has served as a member and/or chair of several national and international committees, including chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Health Statistics, member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, member and chair of the section on the sociology of population for the American Sociological Association, member of the Population Association of America’s (PAA) board of directors, chair of the PAA’s Committee on Population Statistics, and member of an International Advisory Board of the Swedish Initiative for Research on Microdata in the Social and Medical Sciences. This year she was elected as the President-elect of the PAA.

Tamsen M. Brown, C'95, and Michael Brown, established this professorship in 2021. Tamsen is a member of the School’s Board of Advisors, and the Basser Center Advisory Board. Tamsen and Michael are both members of Penn’s Parents Council. In additional to the professorship, they also generously support research at Penn Medicine.