Dr. Taylor Hargrove is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park and a faculty associate at the Maryland Population Research Center. Her research examines how racism and other systems of inequality become embodied and impact population health in the United States. Drawing on stratification, intersectionality, life course, biopsychosocial, and stress process perspectives, Dr. Hargrove employs advanced quantitative methods and analyzes longitudinal, nationally representative datasets spanning the life course from childhood to old age.

Her current program of research investigates linkages among socio-geographic contexts, individual-level status characteristics, and biological measures of health and aging in young adulthood and early mid-life. Through this work, she clarifies how macro- and meso-level environments shape downstream pathways that affect more proximate causes of poor health.

As a Multiple Principal Investigator on several externally funded studies, Dr. Hargrove has also made significant contributions to data infrastructure by linking novel contextual data to existing population-based longitudinal datasets. She has led efforts to build comprehensive data repositories featuring repeated, multilevel measures of structural racism and other measures of demographic, socioeconomic, health, and mobility characteristics at various geographic levels. Additionally, she helped to develop a key biological dataset containing inflammatory and immune markers typically unavailable in population studies.

Dr. Hargrove plans to continue this research to illuminate how social factors, particularly manifestations of structural racism, “get under the skin” to shape health and social inequality. Her work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and her research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Social Forces, Demography, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journals of Gerontology, and Public Policy & Aging Report. 

Before joining the University of Maryland, Dr. Hargrove was an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2016.