Michael Esposito

Michael Esposito is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota who interrogates the (re-)production of racial disparities in U.S. population health through his research. His work investigates how broad, racialized social systems — and their constituent institutions — are configured in ways that layer privileges onto white populations and hazards onto BIPOC populations and how these privileges and penalties subsequently arrive on population welfare. This includes studies that examine how race-cognizant institutions (e.g., law enforcement agencies) contribute to health disparities; research that considers how racialized systems overlap with one another to gate access to generative health contexts; and projects which demonstrate how racism distorts social processes that are made to be foundational to well-being in the U.S. (e.g., status attainment and health). Dr. Esposito makes use of contemporary statistical methods — e.g., Bayesian approaches and techniques for drawing causal(-ish!) inferences from observational data — in addressing these topics.