Chinyere O. Agbai

(CHEEN-yeh-reh AH-bye)

Chinyere Agbai is a postdoctoral fellow and Provost’s Early Career Scholar in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. She will begin her appointment as an assistant professor in the department in autumn 2023. Her research seeks to uncover the roots of the racial wealth gap in homeownership and explore their consequences for racial inequality in wealth and health. More broadly, her work is concerned with the linkages between urban inequality, the racial wealth gap, the social determinants of health, public policy, and structural racism. Her dissertation explores the historical roots of the contemporary racial wealth gap through the lens of one of the largest housing policies in American history: the GI Bill of 1944. It then interrogates the consequences of massive wealth inequality for mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her work appears in journals including Social Science Research and The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and it has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholars Program and the NIH NICHD. It has received awards, including the 2022 Dorothy S. Thomas Student Paper Award from the Population Association of America. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University.