Marc A. Garcia (he/him) is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Sociology Department in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. At Syracuse University, Garcia teaches classes in Minority Aging and Health including, Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Health and Healthcare.
Prior to joining Syracuse University, Garcia was an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 2018-21 where he taught Physical Health Disparities and Sociology of Health Care and Health Professions.
Garcia’s research is organized around two interrelated themes that seek to explain health disparities across the life course in the United States and Mexico to better inform the development of actionable and culturally appropriate health policies. The first focuses on physical and cognitive health disparities among older racial/ethnic and immigrant adults. The second explores longevity and mortality outcomes among older Latinx subgroups. His work has been instrumental in highlighting the heterogeneity among older Latinxs by furthering our understanding of how nativity, country of origin and immigration experiences intersect with gender to create unique trajectories of functional and cognitive impairment for foreign-born people who migrate to the United States in late life.
Recently published work includes “Educational Benefits and Cognitive Health Life Expectancies: Racial/Ethnic, Nativity, and Gender Disparities” in The Gerontologist and “The Color of Covid-19: Structural Racism and the Disproportionate Impact of the Pandemic on Older Black and Latinx Adults” in The Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences.
Past research has been supported by the National Institutes of Aging (NIA) pilot funding from the Michigan Center for Contextual Factors in Alzheimer’s Disease (MCCFAD) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and by the National Science Foundation through the Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) Network and the CONVERGE facility housed at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.
In 2021, Garcia was awarded the Harold & Esther Edgerton Junior Faculty Award by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a highly prestigious University award for an outstanding junior faculty member who has demonstrated creative research, extraordinary teaching abilities, and academic promise.
Professor Garcia is a member of the American Sociological Association, Gerontological Society of America, Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science, and Population Association of America. He currently serves as an editorial board member for the Journal of Health and Social Behavior and the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, and associate editor for the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
Garcia earned a Ph.D. in 2015, from the University of Texas-Austin, an M.S. in 2011 from Texas A&M University, and a B.A. in 2008, from the University of Texas-Pan American University.