Our New Faculty: Alumni Newsletter: October 2019: Newsletter: Alumni + Giving: Department of Sociology: Indiana University Bloomington

Our New Faculty

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Anna S. Mueller

Anna S. Mueller is a medical sociologist whose research emphasizes how social contexts, organizations, and relationships shape individuals’ life chances, in terms of health, wellbeing, and professional/academic opportunities.

The majority of Anna’s current work focuses on understanding (1) how and why youth suicide clusters form and often persist in some schools and communities, but not others, and (2) the social roots of youth suicide. As part of this research, this fall Anna is beginning fieldwork in two communities (with 7 high schools) in Colorado. Both communities have at least one high school with a serious youth suicide problem (including clusters), which provides interesting opportunities for comparisons across schools (and between communities). Thankfully she’s undertaking this project with her wonderful collaborators, Prof. Seth Abrutyn (University of British Columbia) and Dr. Sarah Diefendorf (University of Utah).

When Anna needs a break from studying youth suicide, she switches her focus to her “side” project on the production of gender inequality during emergency medical residency training. Using a really interesting longitudinal dataset of 13,000 in-the-moment numeric and text evaluations of residents by attending physicians, she and her collaborators examine the evaluations (using qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods) to understand how and why women residents trail men residents significantly and substantially in their third and final year of residency, but not in their first.

When she’s not working, Anna loves doing just about anything that gets her outside, but especially hiking, gardening, horse-back riding, and kayaking. She also loves to travel, especially in Latin America, and is a pretty serious trekker. Last summer she made the amazing (if grueling) trek to the virtually unspoiled Inca ruins at Choquequirao (up the Inca Trail from Macchu Picchu in the Peruvian Andes). She can’t wait to do it again.

Anna S. Mueller

Michael Schultz

Mike’s general research interest is in understanding how meso-level social structures like fields and networks emerge from and influence mundane behaviors. His current research examines how networks are conditioned by their context. Specifically, he is studying how network structures are shaped by shared understandings about what relationships mean and how these structures change as understandings change. To this end, his work has looked at how social relationships and demographics affect people’s choice of confidant, how 17th and 18th century states evaluated diplomatic partners in terms of status and prestige, and how situations conditioned the ways NASA astronauts shared information.

Mike’s secondary research aims to advance statistical methods of representing and making inferences about social structures. Broadly speaking, he is interested in how to use nonparametric and computational techniques to improve empirical validity without losing the interpretability, theoretical relevance, or statistical rigor of the models.

In the future, Mike’s research will focus on the intersection of fields, networks, and conversation to explore how the structure and content of interactions influence each other. Methodological work will focus on methods of modeling meaning and structure simultaneously. These models will be used to help understand the dynamics of discussions at the Federal Reserve and how corporations’ self-presentation evolves in emerging sectors of the economy.

Outside of work, he enjoys playing with his two sons, cycling, hiking, and gardening.

Michael Schultz

Our New Faculty

Anna S. Mueller

Michael Schultz

Department of Sociology social media channels

The College of Arts & Sciences