Achievement

TRAINEE PROFILED: Trainee Van C. Tran has been named a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar (2011-13) and begins as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University in 2013. Tran’s remarkable path to Harvard, originally detailed on NPR and the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/nyregion/public-lives-from-hardware-to-harvard-in-a-few-hard-years.html), was highilghted in Harvard’s televised Commencement coverage. Tran’s dissertation brings together two previously distinct strands of research on immigration and urban poverty to examine how neighborhoods matter for social mobility among second generation immigrants. This research has broad implications for theories of immigrant assimilation and neighborhood stratification and for the future contours of ethnic and racial inequality in America. As an RWJ Scholar, Tran will examine how growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods affects mental and physical health outcomes among the immigrant second-generation.