Seth Prins, PhD, MPH

Dr. Prins' research focuses on two areas. The first examines the public health consequences of mass criminalization and incarceration, especially the effects of the school-to-prison pipeline on adolescent health. The second investigates how the division of labor and workplace dynamics shape patterns of mental illness and substance use. Through integration of advanced causal inference methods and contemporary social theory, his work has demonstrated that when policing and incarceration are used to manage public health problems, they reproduce and exacerbate those very same problems. He has also shown that social relations like exploitation, workplace domination, the gender pay gap, and wage theft contribute to higher rates of drinking, depression, anxiety, and mortality. Dr. Prins comes to us from Columbia University, where he was Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences. He earned his PhD in Epidemiology, with a focus on Psychiatric Epidemiology, also from Columbia.