Dr. Liana C. Sayer
Director, Maryland Time Use Laboratory
Professor of Sociology
Dr. Sayer is Director, Maryland Time Use Lab, and Professor of Sociology and the editor of Journal of Marriage and Family. Her research agenda focuses on cross-national and historical determinants, patterns, and consequences of inequalities in time use. A Sociologist and Social Demographer, Dr. Sayer has extensive expertise in conceptual and technical advances in analyzing time use data to understand inequalities in daily behaviors, health and well-being. Her research has provided core contributions to social science understanding of durable inequalities in gendered time use that affect individual well-being and relationship quality and the emergence of time inequalities across gender, racial-ethnic, and social class groups. Her work has been published in leading journals in sociology, demography, and family science. Dr. Sayer is currently PI on NICHD RO1 Time Use Data for Health and Well-being. In 2020, Sayer was the Co-PI on two NSF Rapid grants to study time use and mental health before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Affiliated Faculty
Dr. Long Doan, Associate Professor of Sociology
Long Doan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. He is broadly interested in how various social psychological processes motivate behavior and explain patterns of inequality. In particular, Doan is interested in the intersections of sexuality, gender, and race. His work examines how seemingly subtle differences in evaluations of individuals based on their social characteristics lead to larger, more concrete implications, such as the acceptance or denial of legal rights or decisions related to hiring.
Dr. Kelsey Drotning, U.S. Census Bureau
Dr. Jessica Fish, Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana
Dr. Jessica Fish is a human development and family science scholar whose research focuses on the positive development and health of LGBTQ+ people and their families.
Dr. Jaein Lee, Assistant Professor, Arkansas State University
Jaein Lee is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Arkansas State University. His research explores vital questions on the contexts of individual and social factors shaping inequalities in various demographic outcomes, primarily inequalities in mortality and health behaviors. His recent papers appeared in the Journal of Marriage and Family and Social Forces (with Dr. Caudillo, University of Maryland, College Park). His latest research projects explore how gender differences in attitudes toward homosexuals and suicides are mediated by marital status, age, and religious affiliations in South Korea and other countries (with Dr. Lin, University of Texas, San Antonio), and how trust in government mediates the chance of refusing COVID-19 vaccination in 2020.
Specialty Areas: Demography, Stratification, Aging, Family, Health, Quantitative Methodology
Dr. Melissa Milke, Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto
Melissa A. Milkie is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland. She recently served as President of the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) and is one of the leads for the Care Economies in Context project at the Centre for Global Social Policy at Toronto. Dr. Milkie’s expertise lies in the areas of time use, gender, the work-family interface, culture, and mental health. Her work has examined changing time allocations of and time pressures on parents; refugee mothers’ strains as they integrate children into new communities; and cultural aspects of parenthood in media. Central to her scholarship is highlighting the complexities and social factors linked to how people spend their time and experience their daily lives. Some of her key impacts in family sociology include research that examines the changing work structures and cultural landscapes that shape well-being at work and at home over recent decades. Her work highlight stress processes at individual and family levels and includes contributions to the demands-rewards perspective on parenting. With unique expertise in time use and health, Professor Milkie recent work focuses on how people make meanings about spending time together, including during the pandemic; and her recent work examines cross-country comparisons of “time problems” at the societal and individual levels. Currently, Dr. Milkie is writing a book (with Profs. Liana Sayer and Kei Nomaguchi) entitled Parents Under Pressure: How Mothers and Fathers Spend and Feel about Their Time. This work was cited by the Surgeon General of the United States.
Professor Milkie was recently named as one of the top-cited work-family researchers in the world by the Work-Family Researchers Network (WFRN). She’s published in journals such as American Sociological Review (ASR), British Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Society and Mental Health and Social Psychology Quarterly and is author of the award-winning book Changing Rhythms of American Family Life. Dr. Milkie is Principal Investigator of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight grant and has been supported by a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Professor Milkie has been deputy editor at ASR and Gender & Society and she served as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Advance Professor of Inclusive Excellence at Maryland.
Dr. Kei Nomaguchi, Professor of Sociology, Bowling Green University
Kei Nomaguchi is a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests focus on parenting, parent-child relationships, work-family linkages, and health and well-being. She primarily uses statistical analysis of national data sets to examine disparities in parental and child well-being across social statuses, such as socioeconomic status, gender, race/ethnicity, and family structure, and across life stages and cohorts. She has published extensively on social determinants of parental stress and mental health, work-family conflict, and maternal employment and child outcomes. She is currently investigating racial/ethnic differences in the ideology of motherhood, parental time with children, children’s time use, and parenting stress and well-being over two cohorts of American families. Her work has been published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, the Journal of Family Issues, Family Relations, the Journal of Family and Economic Issues, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Society and Mental Health, Social Science Research, Social Science and Medicine, and Socius.
Dr. Julie Park, Associate Professor of Sociology
Dr. Julie Park is associate professor of Sociology and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland. She served as the Director of Asian American Studies from 2017 to 2022. She is also a faculty associate of the Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC). Prior to joining the Maryland faculty in 2008, she was a research assistant professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development and the associate director of the Population Dynamics Research Group at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. (2003) and M.A. (2001) in sociology as well as a Masters in Urban Planning (1998) from the University of Southern California. She received her B.A. in sociology at the University of California, Davis. Professor Park's research focuses most broadly on the adaptation process of immigrants in the United States which includes the areas of immigration, demography, race, and urban studies. Specifically, she examines how immigrants improve their socioeconomic status with longer duration in the U.S. She also utilizes an innovative cohort method to assess intergenerational mobility across immigrant generations. Second, she considers how residential segregation changes in new and established immigrant gateways. Lastly, she assesses the health and health care access assimilation process of immigrants. Professor Park currently teaches courses in immigration, Asian Americans Studies, and social demography. Other undergraduate courses include Asian American Public Policy and Interethnic Diversity in the West. She has also taught the following graduate courses: Urban Demography and Growth, Urban Diversity and Communication, and Statistics and Arguing from Data.
Dr. Joanna Pepin, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto
Joanna Pepin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. As a family sociologist, she studies inequality as it is woven through couple and family relations. Her current research examines trends in attitudes and behaviors related to the distribution of labor and resources within families, such as who does the housework, who works for pay, and how couples share (or don’t share) earnings and family responsibilities.
Dr. R. Gordon Rinderknecht, Associate Behavioral Scientist, RAND Corp.
R. Gordon Rinderknecht is a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. His research broadly revolves around time use, especially as it relates to social isolation, well-being, and data collection. He has led research appearing in Social Problems, the Journal of Time Use Research, Survey Methods: Insights from the Field, Sage Open, and co-led a book chapter in The Research Handbook of Digital Sociology. He also used the diary he developed during his dissertation work at UMD to collect time use data throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. He currently has a working paper under review that examines changes in social isolation in the U.S. since the 1960’s via harmonized, representative time use data.
COVID Time Use diary data overview and associated publications can be seen at: https://about.mytimeuse.com/
Dr. Hope Xu Yan, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Louisiana State University
Hope Xu Yan's areas of expertise include health and health disparities, race/ethnicity, gender, parenting, children, family, and quantitative methods. Her research centers on how social inequalities in health and well-being are (re)produced within families and through workplace dynamics. One line of her work explores racial-ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in women's health and children’s outcomes. Another focus of her research is gender inequalities and women's well-being in India and China. She also studies health inequalities based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Science & Medicine, Society and Mental Health, Feminist Economics, and others. Prior to attending the University of Maryland, she worked for the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS).
Affiliated Students
Layne Amerikaner, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology
Layne Amerikaner (she/her) is a University of Maryland sociology doctoral candidate and an editorial assistant for the Journal of Marriage and Family. Her research interests include intersectional approaches to studying health and well-being, LGBTQ+ families, and workplace inequality. Her dissertation research, which is supported by a Russell Sage Foundation Dissertation Research Grant, examines workplace experiences and well-being among sexual and gender minority adults in the U.S. during the COVID era. Her writing has been published in Social Science & Medicine, Contexts, The Nation, Ms. Magazine, and Huffington Post, among other outlets. Amerikaner is also the co-author of Thinking Outside the Girl Box: Teaming Up With Resilient Youth in Appalachia, published by Ohio University Press in 2014.
