Iliya Gutin headshot

Iliya Gutin

Contact Information:

igutin@syr.edu

315.443.3114

426 Eggers Hall

Curriculum Vitae

Iliya Gutin

Research Assistant Professor and Senior Research Associate, Center for Policy Research

Research Assistant Professor, Center for Aging and Policy Studies

Research Affiliate, Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health

Highest degree earned

Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2021

Bio

Iliya Gutin is a social demographer and population health researcher, interested in documenting the many ways individual, institutional, and contextual level factors shape social patterns and trends in morbidity and mortality. In pursuing this line of research, Gutin has examined gender, racial and ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographic differences in health behaviors, reported health, biomarkers, and specific causes of death (Annual Review of Sociology; Demographic Research; Demography; Preventative Medicine; Social Science Research).

Gutin is also a medical sociologist, interested in better understanding and evaluating the conceptualization and measurement of health in medicine and research. Iliya has published highly cited work examining the meaning of BMI and obesity (Social Theory & Health; Sociology of Health & Illness), as well as the use of social determinants of health in medicine (Sociology of Health & Illness).

Gutin believes that critical perspectives on the measurement and modeling of health are necessary for improving knowledge of population health, as demonstrated in past and ongoing projects on self-rated health (Demography; Social Science Research) and the operationalization of "despair" (Social Science & Medicine).

His current work addresses international and intranational variation in health, using both vital statistics and survey data to understand poor and declining health in the United States throughout the life course. Gutin also has ongoing projects centered on the determinants and consequences of harmful behaviors like substance use and suicidality, as well as ongoing work developing multidimensional measures of health integrating different biological and social indicators.

Prior to his current position, Gutin was a program officer with the Committee on Population at the National Academy of Sciences. He was also a postdoctoral researcher at the Population Research Center and Center on Aging and Population Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 2021 to 2023.

He received a Ph.D. in sociology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021, having received a B.A. in sociology at The University of Chicago and then worked at NORC as a research analyst.

Selected Publications

Presentations and Events

Gutin, I., Bridger-Staatz, C., Tilstra, A., Ploubidis, G., Dowd, J., Gaydosh, L., Population Association of America Meeting, "Health in Midlife in the UK And USA: International Comparison of Two Nationally Representative Cohorts" (2024)

Oxford University, Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity, "When the Measure Becomes the Metric: Making Sense of the Body Mass Index in Research and Practice" (November, 2023)

Gutin, I., Bridger-Staatz, C., Tilstra, A., Ploubidis, G., Dowd, J., Gaydosh, L., Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Meeting, "Health in Midlife in the UK And USA: International Comparison of Two Nationally Representative Cohorts" (2023)

Gutin, I., Masters, R. K., Population Association of America, "Illustrating the Racialized Mortality Experiences of the U.S. COVID-19 Pandemic via Quarter-Year Changes in U.S. Life Expectancy, 2019-2022" (2023)

Gutin, I., Masters, R. K., MiCDA- TRENDS Network Meeting, "Life Expectancy Trends among U.S. States and Peer Countries, 1980-2020: Estimating the Impact of the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic on Widening Differences" (2023)

Oxford University, Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, "Doing Good “Human Science”: Interdisciplinary Rigor in Research and Pedagogy" (July, 2022)

Add Health Users Conference, "Longitudinal Considerations in Contextual Data Analysis" (July, 2022)

Duke Center for Childhood Obesity Research, "Not ‘Putting a Name to It’: Managing Uncertainty in the Diagnosis of Childhood Obesity" (May, 2022)

Population Association of America, "Body Size, Cardiometabolic Risk, and Educational Disparities in Mortality Among U.S. Adults, 1988-2015" (2022)

Gutin, I., Copeland, W., Godwin, J., Harris, K. M., Hill, S., Shanahan, L., Gaydosh, L., Population Association of America, "Defining Despair: Assessing the Multidimensionality of Despair and its Association with Substance Misuse and Suicidality in Early to Middle Adulthood" (2022)

Gutin, I., Copeland, W., Godwin, J., Shanahan, L., Gaydosh, L., Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Meeting, "Defining Despair: Assessing the Multidimensionality of Despair and its Association with Substance Misuse and Suicidality in Early to Middle Adulthood" (2022)

Gutin, I., Harris, K. M., Aiello, A., Martin, C., Gaydosh, L., Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences Conference, "Feeling your (epigenetic) age: Using epigenetic clocks to understand self-rated health" (2022)

Gutin, I., Masters, R. K., Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Meeting, "Illustrating the Racialized Mortality Experiences of the U.S. COVID-19 Pandemic via Quarter-Year Changes in U.S. Life Expectancy, 2019-2022" (2022)

Tilstra, A. M., Dowd, J. B., Gutin, I., Aburto, J. M., Population Association of America, "Obesity Deaths: How Different Coding Schemas Affect U.S. Life Expectancy Estimates" (2022)

Australia National University, Department of Sociology, "Finding “Meaning”: Making sense of imperfect theories, concepts, measures, and models in sociological research" (January, 2022)

Carolina Population Center Interdisciplinary Research Seminar, "Which Longitudinal Model Should I Choose?" (February, 2021)

Advancing Health Lifestyles Research Mini-Conference, ""The Patient Five, Ten, Twenty Years from Now": Communicating Risk and Defining Success in Childhood Obesity Diagnosis and Treatment" (2021)

American Sociological Association, "Double Jeopardy: The Cumulative Toll of Objective and Subjective Weight Status on Health from Early Life to Adulthood" (2021)

Population Association of America, "Double Jeopardy: The Cumulative Toll of Objective and Subjective Weight Status on Health from Early Life to Adulthood" (2021)

Bollen, K. A., Gutin, I., American Sociological Association, "Trajectories of Subjective Health: Testing Longitudinal Models of Self-Rated Health" (2021)

Bollen, K. A., Gutin, I., Population Association of America, "Trajectories of Subjective Health: Testing Longitudinal Models of Self-Rated Health" (2021)

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Gillings School of Public Health, Department of Health Behavior, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Obesity: Weight-Neutrality in Research on Body Size and Health" (January, 2021)

Eastern Sociological Society, "A Sign of Things to Come: The Role of Uncertainty in Childhood Obesity Research and Practice" (2020)

Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Meeting, "Double Jeopardy: The Cumulative Toll of Objective and Subjective Weight Status on Health from Early Life to Adulthood" (2020)

Gutin, I., Bollen, K. A., Halpern, C. T., Harris, K. M., American Sociological Association, "Subjective Health: Contemporaneous and Retrospective Self-Reports versus Proxy Measures" (2020)

Gutin, I., Bollen, K. A., Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Meeting, "Trajectories of Subjective Health: Testing Longitudinal Models of Self-Rated Health" (2020)

Tilstra, A. M., Gutin, I., Rogers, R. G., Hummer, R. A., Dollar, N. T., Population Association of America, ""Outside the Skin": The Persistence of Racial Disparities in Early Life Mortality" (2019)

Gutin, I., Hummer, R. A., American Sociological Association, "A "Working Class" Crisis: Occupation, Employment Status, and Alcoholic Liver Disease, Suicide, and Accidental Poisoning Mortality Risk among Working-Aged U.S. Adults" (2019)

Population Association of America, "Putting "Work" Back in Working-Aged Mortality: Employment Status, Occupation, and Cause-Specific Mortality among Contemporary Working-Aged U.S. Adults" (2019)

Gutin, I., Bollen, K. A., Halpern, C. T., Harris, K. M., Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Meeting, "Subjective Health: Contemporaneous and Retrospective Self-Reports versus Proxy Measures" (2019)

Honors and Accolades

Poster Award Winner, PAA Meeting, Atlanta (2022)

Wilson Teaching Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2021)

Graduate Student Pilot Research Fund, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2020)

Odum Award for Research Excellence, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2020)

Royster Dissertation Completion Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2020)

Summer Research Fellowship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2020)

Research Award, IPUMS (2019)

Student Award, Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science (IAPHS) (2019)

NICHD Traineeship in Population Studies (2016 - 2019)

Travel Grant, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2016 - 2019)