
Jose Martin Aveldanes
I am currently a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. In previous years, I was a National Institutes of Health Fellow in the Department of Demography under the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Branch for Child and Human Development support. I earned my Bachelor of Science in Sociology from the University of South Carolina, where I received training in quantitative methodology; During my time at South Carolina, I co-authored an article with Drs. Carla Pfeffer and Jennifer Augustine on the amount of time same-sex couples with children spend in activities related to health and well-being. I'm broadly interested in contemporary American families and under that umbrella my research spans three substantive areas: same-sex couples and their population-level outcomes (e.g., marriage, health, education), the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage, and social mobility and inequality among LGBTQ+ populations. To this end—I utilize nationally-representative longitudinal data, methods of causal inference, and computational social science. I have worked with the American Time Use Surveys, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health, and the American Census to investigate these interests. In 2020, I worked on the CenSoc project in the Department of Demography at UC Berkeley, linking the 1940 Census to files from the Social Security Administration. I also mentored Cal-ADAR students on using R and data science to enter into the world of quantitative social science.