About

My name is Aja Sutton (she/her; my first name is pronounced /ˈeɪʒə/). I hold a PhD in Geography from the University of Washington (UW). I am a geographer, demographer, and computational social scientist. I am broadly interested in population health; especially how lived environments, information, group- and individual-level behaviour (incl. policy), and population characteristics interact, drive, produce, or reinforce health differences and inequalities. My research incorporates computational and statistical modelling, survey science, as well as theory and quantitative methods from across the social sciences (e.g., social and behavioural ecology, sociology, epidemiology). I am also interested in methodological development, especially indirect population estimation using surveys and Bayesian (spatial) statistics.

Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Climate Change Epidemiology Lab at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography CASPO under Professor Tarik Benmarhnia. Previously, I have held positions in the Population Research Center at Portland State University, and in the Human Evolutionary Ecology and Health Lab in the Department of Environmental Social Sciences, Stanford University with Prof. James Holland Jones.

During my doctoral training, I was a TADA-BSSR NIH T32 Fellow in Data Science and Demography at UW’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) (2020-2022), where I also received a Certificate in Demographic Methods from CSDE.

My other training is broad: I am trained in history, and human bioarchaeology. In the past, I have provided technical osteological expertise to a major cultural resources company on the West Coast of the United States. My osteology work has focused on historic North American settler archaeological contexts, but my academic training focused on early medieval British populations. My previous training in history and bioarchaeology has provided me with a unique perspective on human social systems, behaviour and health over time.

Some of my specific research interests include: the social and behavioural ecologies of health and disease, social and health inequality, decision-making and social identity, social media use and misinformation, agent-based models and generative social science methods, the social epidemiology of infectious disease, Bayesian spatial and temporal statistics, social and spatial processes of homelessness, the life course, and game theory.