Courtney Boen, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Professor and Axilrod Faculty Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a Research Associate in the Penn Population Studies Center and Population Aging Research Center and an Affiliate in the Center for the Study for Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration at the Penn. Dr. Boen’s research focuses on the social determinants of population health inequality, with particular attention to the social factors producing racial, immigrant-native, and socioeconomic health inequities across the life span. Utilizing biomarkers of physiological functioning and aging and a variety of analytic techniques, her work aims to improve scientific understanding how macro-level social inequality shapes micro-level biophysiological processes to produce health disparities from birth through late life.
Currently, Dr. Boen is leading several research projects examining how structures of racial domination and immigrant exclusion pattern stress exposure across domains of social life (e.g., in contacts with the criminal justice system, in exclusion from wealth accumulation processes, in exposure to immigration enforcement activities) in ways that shape population health. Her research has been published in a number of outlets, including the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Journals of Gerontology, Biodemography and Social Biology, Journal of Aging and Health, Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention, and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Dr. Boen received her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MPH from Tufts University.
