Alexis R. Santos , Ph.D.

Biography

I am currently an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. I am a Demographic Data Fellow for the Administrative Data Accelerator, where we are using administrative records to answer policy relevant questions. I will be involved in studies that leverage vital statistics that aid public policy decision-making.  I am also a Research Associate of the Population Research Institute, a center that has been supportive of my research since my arrival to Penn State. I received a Ph.D. in Applied Demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio (2012-2015). Before coming to Penn State, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Brooke Army Medical Center (Fort Sam Houston, Texas). I served as Director of Graduate Studies in Applied Demography at the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Penn State University between 2015-2018. Before moving to San Antonio, I completed a M.A. in Economics at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (2012) and a B.A. in Economics at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey (2010), where I also completed all the coursework for the Minor in Statistics in 2012. I was born in Hartford, CT to Puerto Rican parents who returned to Puerto Rico in 1990. I was raised in Caguas, Puerto Rico in a female headed-household. I went to elementary school in the Paula Mojica Elementary School, and completed the rest of my education at Academia Cristo the los Milagros. Some of my non-academic interests include: music, history, salsa, reading Snoopy, board games, and writing to my elected officers to discuss social issues.

My quantitative work focuses on studying whether “well-established” associations found in health, stress and aging literature are universal or whether there are exceptions to them. I employ both self-reported and objective measures of health. 

My work is highly dependent on decomposition and regression-models ranging from: OLS, logistic and multilevel models. In this line of work, I focus on interaction effects and employ stratified or population-specific analyses to determine for whom are these “well-established” patterns true. I have also employed Age-Period-Cohort methods to explore patterns underlying the associations of interest. 

My emerging work focuses on the application of synthetic controls, outlier detections and quasi-experimental design (i.e. causal impact) to determine the effects of an intervention or exogenous shock concerning a time-series of interest. For this work, I employ both n-of-1 and those that employ the production of a counterfactual using observations not affected by the shock.