BIO
Stephen A. Matthews is Liberal Arts Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Demography (Courtesy Geography and School of International Affairs) and for the past five years has been director of the Graduate Program in Demography at Penn State. The Graduate Program in Demography is a multi-department, multi-college, dual-degree program with over 40+ faculty, 60+ graduate students and 30+ substantive and methods courses. Matthews was trained in quantitative geography and planning and for eighteen years served as director of the Geographic Information Analysis (GIA) Core at Penn State’s NICHD-funded Population Research Institute. He has led NIH-funded training initiatives in spatial thinking and methodologies applied to health and demographic research in the United States, and was co-editor of a recent book, Recapturing Space: New Middle-range Theory in Spatial Demography (Howell, Porter, and Matthews, 2016). The central tenets of Matthews’ teaching and research scholarship are population health and health inequality in community contexts. He has published in the leading journals in several fields – demography, sociology, geography, public health and epidemiology – on topics including residential segregation and neighborhood change, activity space research, physical activity, diet and obesity, food environments, alcohol outlets, adolescent risk-taking behaviors, access to health, women’s health, mortality, border malaria, social/spatial networks, crime, and religious landscapes. Matthews was an associate editor for Demographic Research (2012-2016) and has recently served on the editorial boards of three other journals: American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2005-2016); Spatial Demography (2012-2016); and GeoJournal (2010-2016). He has served on the editorial board of Demography since 2010, and in 2016 began formal duties as co-editor of the journal (term: 2016-2019).