The Department of Sociology is pleased to announce that Taylor Hargrove will be joining us as an Associate Professor in fall 2025. Hargrove comes to the department from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a faculty fellow of the Carolina Population Center.

"Professor Hargrove is an innovative, methodologically accomplished, and highly respected scholar," writes Chair Liana Sayer. "Her trajectory moving forward is exceptionally strong and her interdisciplinary work positions her to become even more of a leader across multiple sociological sub-fields. She will be an integral member of the Department of Sociology and a major asset to BSOS and the University of Maryland." 

The Department of Sociology at UMD has long stood at the forefront of addressing complex social issues through innovative research. I'm honored to become part of this dynamic intellectual community and eager to collaborate across disciplines to create impactful scholarship and transformative educational experiences. I see tremendous opportunities to build on the department's strengths while exploring new directions together with my colleagues and students.
Taylor Hargrove

Rashawn Ray explains that a "major strength of Hargrove’s work is that she tracks the effects of complex social processes and social structures (such as structural racism) in a wide set of biomarkers ranging from body mass index (BMI) to dementia and cardiometabolic risk." This represents a "novel approach to the literature on social determinants of health outcomes...[and] brings us greater understanding of both distal and proximate social factors that intervene upstream of individual outcomes, highlighting the contributions of sociology to the study of health and health disparities."

Hargrove's work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and has been featured in leading journals including Social Forces, Demography, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journals of Gerontology, and Public Policy & Aging Report. 

Hargrove will teach courses on social inequality, health disparities, and aging and the life course while continuing to investigate how social factors, particularly manifestations of structural racism, “get under the skin” to shape health and social inequality.  

Hargrove earned her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2016.

Welcome Dr. Hargrove!

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