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FACULTY BIOGRAPHIES -- Rachel Sullivan Robinson

Rachel Sullivan Robinson
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
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Rachel Sullivan Robinson joined the SIS faculty as an assistant professor in fall 2007 after completing her Ph.D. in sociology and demography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the politics of population and reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa and seeks to answer larger questions about how African governments and organizations differentially accept and transform foreign aid and ideas. Robinson’s dissertation analyzed African countries’ responses to rapid population growth by integrating statistical modeling techniques with fieldwork from Nigeria and original data on NGOs in Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania. She found that governmental characteristics, the magnitude of a country’s interaction with the World Bank, and global trends in thinking about population growth predict which countries adopted population policies and when. She also showed that patterns in international aid as well as a country’s level of autocracy drive the rise and fall in reproductive health NGOs’ numbers. Robinson’s current project extends the research from her dissertation to look at how countries’ political and organizational responses to rapid population growth have influenced their ability to combat HIV/AIDS.

Robinson’s research has been published in the journals Demography and Population Studies. She has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Nigeria, and Namibia. Within SIS, Robinson is affiliated with Comparative and Regional Studies and will be teaching Quantitative Analysis for International Affairs (SIS 600) in both fall 2007 and spring 2008. In addition to a passion for all things demographic, Robinson enjoys traveling, cooking, and spending time outside.

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