Iliya Gutin

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.

Demography, medical sociology, social determinants of health and health Disparities, health measurement and modelling