Hi, i’m Nafeesa!
a sociologist & demographer working to understand and alleviate health disparities among Muslim immigrants
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Michigan, with a joint appointment in the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research. I am also an M-PACT Scholar; the Michigan Program for Advancing Cultural Transformation supports interdisciplinary and innovative scholars in the Biomedical and Health Sciences.
I study the processes and consequences of anti-Muslim racism, with a focus on Muslim immigrants in the US, sociopolitical stress, & reproductive health outcomes.
I currently use large-scale administrative data & quantitative methods to examine the prevalence of adverse birth outcomes among South Asian, MENA (Middle Eastern North African), and African Muslim immigrant mothers. I am interested in how and why race, religion, and nativity intersect to shape health outcomes among Muslim immigrants in the US. I also explore how the local sociopolitical climate is related to poorer birth outcomes among Muslim immigrants.
My research & training has been funded by the National Science Foundation, American Sociological Association, Society of Family Planning & the National Institutes of Health. My work has been published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Social Science & Medicine, JAMA Pediatrics, & Social Problems.
I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in July 2024. At Carolina, I was a T32 Biosocial Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. I spent Spring 2023 in Washington D.C. as a Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, where I worked closely with the Committee on Populations and the Committee on National Statistics. I joined Dr. Goleen Samari’s lab in the Department of Population & Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine as a Postdoctoral Fellow from 2024-2025.