About

Elizabeth Frankenberg is a Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her areas of interest include demography, health, illness, and medical sociology. She serves as the Director of the Carolina Population Center, contributing to research and leadership in population studies. Her work focuses on understanding the social and demographic factors influencing health and illness, and she is actively involved in teaching, learning, and service within the department.

Research topics

• Geography
• Environmental health
• Demography
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Medicine
• Ecology
• Surgery
• Medical emergency
• Business
• Mathematics
• Socioeconomics
• Remote sensing
• Agroforestry
• Environmental science
• Forestry
• Statistics

Selected publications

• High-resolution imagery and neural networks link post-tsunami land cover changes to population health and well-being

  UNC Libraries · 2026-03-26

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• High-resolution imagery and neural networks link post-tsunami land cover changes to population health and well-being

  Communications Earth & Environment · 2026-03-18

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  As extreme events intensify in force and frequency across the globe, relating the damage and subsequent reconstruction to population health and well-being remains a critical frontier. Here we build a convolutional neural network to classify landcover from satellite images of Indonesia before and after the December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and link those measures to population well-being to demonstrate methods that advance analyses of short-term impacts of extreme events and impacts 5 years later. Population data are from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR) and 2005 and 2010 censuses. We develop manually labelled training data for eight landcover classes and demonstrate the model performs well using standard metrics. Moreover, measures of change over time in landcover correlate strongly with multiple dimensions of well-being from our household survey data and with aggregate population statistics, both immediately after the event and in the subsequent five years.

  PublisherDOI

• Extreme events, educational aspirations, and long-term outcomes

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Explaining adverse cholesterol levels and distinct gender patterns in an Indonesian population compared with the U.S.

  Economics & Human Biology · 2024-05-25 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Cardiovascular disease is among the most common causes of death around the world. As rising incomes in low and middle-income countries are accompanied by increased obesity, the burden of disease shifts towards non-communicable diseases, and lower-income settings make up a growing share of cardiovascular disease deaths. Comparative investigation of the roles of body composition, behavioral and socioeconomic factors across countries can shed light on both the biological and social drivers of cardiovascular disease more broadly. Comparing rigorously-validated measures of HDL and non-HDL cholesterol among adults in the United States and in Aceh, Indonesia, we show that Indonesians present with adverse cholesterol biomarkers relative to Americans, despite being younger and having lower body mass index. Adjusting for age, the gaps increase. Body composition, behaviors, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics that affect cholesterol do not explain between-country HDL differences, but do explain non-HDL differences, after accounting for medication use. On average, gender differences are inconsistent across the two countries and persist after controlling observed characteristics. Leveraging the richness of the Indonesian data to draw comparisons of males and females within the same household, the gender gaps among Indonesians are not explained for HDL cholesterol but attenuated substantially for non-HDL cholesterol. This finding suggests that unmeasured household resources play an important role in determining non-HDL cholesterol. More generally, they appear to be affected by social and biological forces in complex ways that differ across countries and potentially operate differently for HDL and non-HDL biomarkers. These results point to the value of rigorous comparative studies to advance understanding of cardiovascular risks across the globe.

  PublisherDOI

• Extreme Events, Educational Aspirations and Long-term Outcomes

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-07-01

  reportOpen access

  The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was an extremely destructive event in Aceh, Indonesia, killing over 160, 000 people and destroying infrastructure, homes, and livelihoods over miles of coastline. In its immediate aftermath, affected populations faced a daunting array of challenges. At the population level, questions of how the disaster affected children’s and parents’ aspirations for education and whether it permanently disrupted schooling progression are critical in understanding how shocks affect human capital in the short and long term. We use longitudinal data from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR) to examine how disaster exposure affects educational aspirations and eventual attainment. We find that damage to one’s community depresses aspirations in the short term but that this weakens with time. With respect to educational attainment 15 years after the event, children’s aspirations, parents’ education, and family socioeconomic status are more important determinants of whether children complete high school and go on to tertiary schooling than disaster exposure. While these results likely reflect, at least in part, the successful post-tsunami reconstruction program, they also establish enormous resilience among survivors who bore the brunt of the tsunami.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Saltwater intrusion and sea level rise threatens U.S. rural coastal landscapes and communities

  Anthropocene · 2024-01-13 · 40 citations

  articleOpen access

  The United States (U.S.) coastal plain is subject to rising sea levels, land subsidence, more severe coastal storms, and more intense droughts. These changes lead to inputs of marine salts into freshwater-dependent coastal systems, creating saltwater intrusion. The penetration of salinity into the coastal interior is exacerbated by groundwater extraction and the high density of agricultural canals and ditches throughout much of the rural U.S. landscape. Together saltwater intrusion and sea level rise (SWISLR) create substantial changes to the social-ecological systems situated along the coastal plain. Many scholars and practitioners are engaged in studying and managing SWISLR impacts on social, economic, and ecological systems. However, most efforts are localized and disconnected, despite a widespread desire to understand this common threat. In addition to variable rates of sea level rise across the U.S. outer coastal plain, differences in geomorphic setting, water resources infrastructure and management, and climate extremes are resulting in different patterns of saltwater intrusion. Understanding both the absolute magnitude of this rapid environmental change, and the causes and consequences for its spatial and temporal variation presents an opportunity to build new mechanistic models to link directional climate change to temporally and spatially dynamic socio-environmental impacts. The diverse trajectories of change offer rich opportunities to test and refine modern theories of ecosystem state change in systems with exceptionally strong socioecological feedbacks.

  PublisherDOI

• Extreme events, educational aspirations, and long-term outcomes

  Population and Environment · 2024-07-29

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Education and Adult Cognition in a Low-income Setting: Differences among Adult Siblings

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-04-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  The relationship between completed education and adult cognition is investigated using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey.We compare adult siblings to account for shared, difficult-tomeasure characteristics that likely affect this relationship, including genetics and parental preferences and investments.After establishing the importance of shared family background factors, we document substantively large, significant impacts of education on cognition in models with sibling fixed effects.In contrast, the strong positive correlation between education and adult height is reduced to zero in models with sibling fixed effects, suggesting little contamination in the education-height association beyond factors common to siblings.

  PublisherDOI

• Explaining Adverse Cholesterol Levels and Distinct Gender Patterns in an Indonesian Population Compared with the U.S.

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-05-01

  reportOpen access

  In order to shed light on the biological and social drivers underlying the dramatic rise in cardiovascular disease risk in lower-income settings, links between these risks and body composition, behavioral and socioeconomic factors in Aceh, Indonesia, are contrasted with the United States.We focus on rigorously-validated measures of HDL and non-HDL cholesterol among adults.Indonesians present with adverse cholesterol biomarkers relative to Americans, despite being younger and having lower body mass index.Adjusting for age, these gaps increase in magnitude.Body composition, behaviors, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics that affect cholesterol do not explain between-country HDL differences, but do explain non-HDL differences, after accounting for medication use.On average, gender differences are inconsistent across the two countries and persist after controlling observed characteristics.Leveraging the richness of the Indonesian data to draw comparisons between males and females within the same household, the gender gaps among Indonesians are not explained for HDL cholesterol, but attenuated substantially for non-HDL cholesterol.This finding suggests that unmeasured household resources play an important role in determining non-HDL cholesterol.More generally, they appear to be affected by social and biological forces in complex ways that differ across countries and potentially operate differently for HDL and non-HDL biomarkers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Education and Adult Cognition in a Low-Income Setting: Differences among Adult Siblings

  Journal of Human Capital · 2024-12-12 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  The relationship between completed education and adult cognition is investigated using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. We compare adult siblings to account for shared, difficult-to-measure characteristics that likely affect this relationship, including genetics and parental preferences and investments. After establishing the importance of shared family background factors, we document substantively large, significant effects of education on cognition in models with sibling fixed effects. In contrast, the strong positive correlation between education and adult height is reduced to zero in models with sibling fixed effects, suggesting little contamination in the education-height association beyond factors common to siblings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant P01HD028372

  NIH · $11.8M · 2005

• NIH Grant R01AG031266

  NIH · $4.8M · 2020

• Long-term Effects of a Natural Disaster on Cognitive Aging, Dementia, Health and Well-being of Older Adults

  NIH · $2.7M · 2020–2026

• Social, Economic, and Physical Effects of a Natural Disaster

  NSF · $727k · 2005–2009

• NIH Grant R29HD032627

  NIH · $596k · 2001

Frequent coauthors

• Duncan Thomas

  Duke University

  109 shared

• Cecep Sumantri

  26 shared

• Wayan Suriastini

  22 shared

• Fangfang Yao

  Ningbo No. 2 Hospital

  22 shared

• Shuai Zhang

  21 shared

• Xiao Yang

  Southern Methodist University

  20 shared

• Bondan Sikoki

  20 shared

• Conghe Song

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  16 shared