Research Associate · Harvard University

Renae Wilkinson

I am a Research Associate with Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, with an affiliation at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Initiative on Health and Homelessness.

My scholarship is broadly engaged in the disciplines of epidemiology, public health, and sociology, where I employ quantitative methods alongside longitudinal and administrative data to study how social and structural conditions shape health across the life course.

My research asks how housing instability and homelessness shape family relationships, health, and well-being across the life course. I work in three interconnected areas: 1) housing insecurity and health, with an emphasis on evaluating the policies and programs that promote stability, as well as the strategies that families use themselves; 2) social determinants of health across the life course, with particular attention to family and social relationships as modifiable risk and protective factors; and 3) pathways to flourishing across nations through the Global Flourishing Study, a large-scale multinational longitudinal cohort, where I focus on childhood experiences, social relationships, and housing. Across these areas, I am especially interested in how family relationships operate as mechanisms linking housing insecurity to health and well-being.

My research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center on Homelessness among Veterans, and my work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Social Science & Medicine, npj Mental Health Research, Journal of Urban Health, and the American Journal of Public Health with a forthcoming paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

I hold a Ph.D. in Sociology with a specialization in Health from Baylor University, master’s degrees from Baylor University (Sociology) and the University of Portland (Business Administration), and a B.A. in Sociology from Portland State University.