Marc A. Garcia joined the department of sociology and the Institute for Ethnic Studies as an assistant professor during fall 2018. He came to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln after completing his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Texas-Austin and an NIA postdoc in Minority Health and Aging at the University of Texas-Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas.
Dr. Garcia is an expert in immigrant health and aging. He examines how race/ethnicity, nativity, and gender interact with key social, economic, and environmental factors to shape physical health, cognitive functioning, and mortality outcomes of aging minority and immigrant groups in the United States and Mexico. He has had an incredibly successful start to his time at Nebraska, with publications in 2018 alone in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, Aging & Mental Health, Journal of Aging and Health, Demographic Research, Innovating in Aging, The Gerontologist, Research on Aging, and the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Recent findings by Dr. Garcia indicate that selection mechanisms and acculturation processes associated with the immigrant experience depend on both biological age and gender; suggesting the utility of an integrated life course approach to contextualize the health and mortality profiles of older immigrants.
In the fall of 2018, Dr Garcia taught the cross-listed SOCI/ETHN 481/881 Minority Groups course to both undergraduates and graduate students. He will be teaching this class as part of the regular sociology department rotation, as well as other classes on health, race and ethnicity, and aging and the life course.
Welcome, Dr. Marc Garcia, to Nebraska sociology!
