Sarah Garcia is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. She is engaged in and committed to cross-disciplinary research with a focus on sociology and demography. Her areas of research are health disparities, race and ethnicity, disability studies, and demography. In particular, she studies the persistent relationship between education and health, and the relationship between economic inequality and disability. Sarah’s dissertation examines whether the recent increase in disability among working-age Americans is concentrated in regions experiencing economic distress due to deindustrialization.

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Sociology and the Minnesota Population Center. She specializes in racial inequality in mortality and historical infectious disease and co-leads (with J.P. Leider) an ongoing project on COVID-19 mortality in Minnesota. She is also a quantitative methodologist, developing models designed to clarify relationships between micro and macro perspectives on demographic relationships.