Reanne Frank
Professor
she/her
Townshend Hall 212
1885 Neil Ave.
Columbus, OH 43210
Office Hours
By Appointment
Areas of Expertise
- Immigration/Migration
- Social Demography
- Racial/Ethnic Inequality
- Health Disparities
- Fertility
Education
- Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 2002
How to pronounce my name:
Research Interests: Immigration/migration; social demography; racial/ethnic inequality; health and mortality
Broadly speaking my research focuses on the ways in which demographic outcomes are influenced by the migration process and by racial/ethnic inequality. My published work focuses on the contemporary immigrant population in the U.S., with an emphasis on the Latine sub-population, and uses data from a variety of secondary sources to investigate issues of fertility and childbearing, family formation patterns, COVID-19 mortality, racial identity and discrimination, language use, residential attainment, and health disparities.
The seeds of my research interest in immigration and racial/ethnic inequality were planted during my childhood growing up in the city of Detroit in the 1980s when the city was struggling to come to terms with several population challenges including extremely high levels of racial/ethnic residential segregation and economic turmoil, high rates of suburbanization, and an increasing number of new immigrant communities within the city. I have found a demographic perspective to be particularly useful for understanding and helping to solve these types of social challenges as it orients us towards a focus on specific population groups, their size, composition, and distribution and how they interact with, and are shaped by, broader social contexts. I am a big promoter of the utility of a demographic approach to social research and encourage all my students to learn more about the Institute for Population Research here at OSU. https://ipr.osu.edu/