New Faculty Profile

Elizabeth Anderson

Elizabeth Anderson is delighted to be joining the KU Sociology Department as an Assistant Professor this fall! She recently completed her PhD in Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. 

Her research uses health and healthcare as lenses to understand social inequalities in the United States. Specifically, her substantive research interests center on sexual and reproductive healthcare as a key site of gender, socioeconomic, and geographic inequalities. Elizabeth’s recent work has considered how healthcare policy, including Medicaid, shapes inequalities in women’s ability to access sexual and reproductive healthcare. Her work has appeared in journals such as Science Advances and Social Science & Medicine – Population Health. 

She is excited to share her interests in research methods, gender, and medical sociology with undergraduate students this fall and for the opportunity to join her new colleagues in the Sociology Department. 

Tyler Myroniuk

Tyler Myroniuk is excited to join the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas as an Assistant Professor this Fall. He is a social demographer and comes to us from the Department of Public Health at the University of Missouri. 

Tyler’s scholarly and teaching interests are broadly in the areas of internal migration, family dynamics, and health—particularly mental health and obesity—in sub-Saharan Africa as well as interdisciplinary approaches to reduce geographic and socioeconomic barriers to health programming, such as prevention and harm reduction from substance use, in the United States. His recent work has appeared in Demography, the Journal of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Social Science & Medicine-Mental Health, the American Journal of Human Biology, and the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment. 

Tyler primarily uses quantitative methods for his longitudinal research yet also can employ qualitative techniques and multi-method approaches; the research question determines the method. Some of his new projects include: 1) examining if there is an inflection point in aging individuals’ health when they become net receivers of help from their family members rather than net givers (in rural Malawi); 2) whether the presence of family and types of support offered for young, urban poor, mothers is associated with residential stability (Nairobi, Kenya); and 3) identifying barriers to following through with head and neck cancer treatment among individuals from populations that already disproportionately experience disparate health outcomes due to social and geographic inequity (rural/urban central Missouri—awaiting NIH R01 Notice of Award). 

Tyler is thrilled about the opportunity to contribute to this highly regarded department, go back to his disciplinary origins in sociology, and help students achieve their academic and career goals.