Hunter Wade York, MPH

I am a second-year PhD student at Princeton University in the Department of Sociology and the Office of Population Research, and my research interests revolve around social stratification, economic mobility, families, demography, and culture. Prior to Princeton, I received an MPH in Global Health from the University of Washington and an AB in Human Evolutionary Biology and Music from Harvard. My interests in big data, sociology, and science began with the Natural History of Song project at Harvard in which we described human universals in music making and musical perception from a evolutionary psychology context. After a pivot to the health sciences, I used my expieriences with behavioral lab work and very messy crowdsourced data to inform analyses of large-scale household surveys and linked registry data. Having worked in social epidemiology for over three years, I watched my research interests move increasingly away from the proximate causes of inequalities in health outcomes to their more distal counterparts: polities, culture, and human nature.
As I undertake my PhD, I hope to keep my past work in evolutionary psychology and public health close at hand while diving deeper into traditional sociology theory and methods. To that end, I am most interested in the intergenerational inheritance of socio-economic position, prospects for social mobility given inhereted social capital, rigorous methods for measuring inequality rooted in lived experiences of inequality, and using social justice to inform my research. Additionally, I am interested in innovative methods involving machine learning and big data; and I am interested in sociological theory rooted in evolutionary psychology, informed by moral philosphy, and specific to unique geographies and political systems.
As I undertake my PhD, I hope to keep my past work in evolutionary psychology and public health close at hand while diving deeper into traditional sociology theory and methods. To that end, I am most interested in the intergenerational inheritance of socio-economic position, prospects for social mobility given inhereted social capital, rigorous methods for measuring inequality rooted in lived experiences of inequality, and using social justice to inform my research. Additionally, I am interested in innovative methods involving machine learning and big data; and I am interested in sociological theory rooted in evolutionary psychology, informed by moral philosphy, and specific to unique geographies and political systems.