I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

I received my PhD in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, having received my BA in Sociology at the University of Chicago and then worked at the NORC research organization as a research analyst. My work focuses on the conceptualization, definition, and measurement of health, illness, and disease in medical and social research, and how these decisions influence what it means to be “healthy” in a highly-dynamic and stratified society. Specifically, my dissertation examined clinical, epidemiologic, and subjective ambiguity in our understanding of body weight as a health risk, and how we can better account for this uncertainty in studying population health. I also have an active research agenda in social demography and population health, focused on documenting and better understanding health disparities. I hope to continue this kind of work throughout my career, collaborating with health researchers across different disciplines and backgrounds to achieve closer and more meaningful linkages between the health concepts, issues, and disparities we are interested in and the measures we have access to in our data.

Feel free to contact me at iliya.gutin@austin.utexas.edu.