Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholars


The Delaware Valley Association is fortunate to have 11 college and university Phi Beta Kappa Chapters in our region.  The Phi Beta Kappa national Visiting Scholars program supports bringing eminent annually designated academic scholars as speakers to Chapters across the country.  

The Rho of Pennsylvania Chapter at Temple University hosted Professor Mark D. Hayward, a health demographer and population health scientist, in February 2023 for two days of talks and interactions, as one of the 2022-2023 PBK Visiting Scholars.  Professor Hayward received his PhD in sociology from Indiana University and is professor of sociology, Centennial Commission Professor in the Liberal Arts, a faculty research associate of the Population Research Center, and director of the Population Health Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. He recently served as the the president of the Southern Demographic Association, chair of the Aging and Life Course section of the American Sociological Association, and is the chair of the Sociology of Population section of the ASA. He has served on the boards of the Population Association of America and the Society of Biodemography and Social Biology. He is a member of the Committee on Population, National Academy of Sciences, and the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Center for Health Statistics. 

Professor Hayward's primary research addresses how life course exposures and events influence the morbidity and mortality experiences of the adult population. Recent studies have clarified how early life conditions influence socioeconomic, race and gender disparities in adult morbidity and mortality; the demography of race/ethnic and gender disparities in healthy life expectancy; social inequality in the biomarkers of aging, and the health consequences of marriage, divorce, and widowhood. He has investigated the fundamental inequalities in adult mortality in the US arising from educational experience, differences in these associations by race and gender, and trends in inequality in mortality. He is part of a national scientific team examining the role of federal and state policies shaping the growing inequality in life chances in the US adult population. 

Professor Hayward's public lecture during his visit at Temple was entitled, "Improving Our Nation's Health", in which he addressed why, although life expectancy in high-income countries has improved dramatically, the US has fallen significantly behind, with this divergence continuing unabated for over 40 years.  His lecture reviewed the ways in which growing social inequality in health, federal policies and the rise of New Federalism may have contributed to this adverse trend in US life expectancy, and highlighted the fast-growing geographic inequality of mortality among US states. Professor Hayward also hypothesized that politics has become a growing force in increasing an array of health risks for many Americans.