We are pleased to welcome Ramina Sotoudeh. She will be joining us as an Assistant Professor of Sociology with a secondary appointment in Statistics & Data Science, on July 1, 2023. Ramina works on topics related to sociogenomics, culture, health and inequality. What unites these different lines of research is an interest in how the effects of individual attributes and attitudes are shaped by the cultural and relational contexts in which they are embedded.
Her work in sociogenomics studies the complex interplay between genes and the social environment. Her dissertation examined how the institutional, relational, and genetic contexts of schools shape individual health outcomes. In one paper, she studied the effects that other people’s genes have on one’s own smoking behaviors. In another, she shows how the harshness with which schools punish smoke influences social network formation around smoking behavior and the role that genes play in mediating these effects.
Her work in the sociology of culture employs relational methods to understand the shared frameworks that underpin understandings of a wide range of topics including marriage, science, politics, and religion. In an ongoing project with collaborators, she is studying the various ways in which Americans understand the relationship between religion and science in light of recent challenges to their cultural authority.
Ramina’s work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, PNAS, Demography, Sociological Methods and Research, among others. Before joining Yale, Ramina was a postdoctoral fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She received her Ph.D. in 2021 from Princeton University.