Zohra Ansari-Thomas

Zohra Ansari-Thomas is a doctoral candidate in demography and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and an affiliated student with the Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science. Her research covers topics related to health and aging, caregiving, migration, family formation, and intergenerational relations. Her recently published work includes a project examining the care needs and arrangements of older immigrants living in the United States, which uses a life course framework to study aging, health, and caregiving among immigrant families, and another project examining temporal connections between migration and union formation among Hispanic immigrants in the United States, which highlights distinctions in the types of partnerships (marital vs. non-marital) formed across the migration life course. She also led a project which draws attention to racial/ethnic disparities in sexual health among adolescents, and collaborated on a project documenting racial/ethnic disparities in criminal legal system contact among young adults. Zohra is currently involved in a co-authored project examining how the provision of care work, including gender distribution and marketization, has shifted over time, and is developing several new projects pertaining to aging and care work, which aim to address racial and immigrant exclusion in long-term care options, and examine caregiving provided by aging individuals themselves.
Prior to joining the Population Studies Center and Department of Sociology at UPenn, Zohra worked as a policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, where her work focused on sexual and reproductive health among immigrants and adolescents, and completed a Master's of Public Health in Epidemiology at George Washington University.