Omer Gersten's Homepage, UC Berkeley Demography Dept.

Omer Gersten
UC Berkeley Demography Dept.
2232 Piedmont Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94720
Phone: (510) 642-9800
FAX: (510) 643-8558
Email: omer at demog.berkeley.edu

Welcome to my homepage! I am currently a researcher at UC Berkeley's Demography Department. Before this position I was a research scientist at the National Health Research Institutes located in Zhunan, Taiwan and before that I completed a two-year postdoc at the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. I received my BA in Sociology, MPH, and PhD in Demography all from UC Berkeley.

My current research focuses on the intersection of topics concerned with social relations, stress, and health/aging, with particular attention to how stressors in the social world influence the body's neuroendocrine system. Please contact me if you are interested in my work, want latest drafts of papers, or are interested in pursuing an academic collaboration. Thanks.

Work in Progress

Gersten, O., Boyce, W.T., and P.S. Timiras. Does lower subjective status yield riskier biomarker profiles?
Gersten, O., Wilmoth, J.R., and M. Barbieri. The epidemiologic transition revisited: incorporating into this seminal theory what we now know about cancers.
Rosero-Bixby, L., Dow, W.H., Gersten, O., and M. Rodriguez. Predicting mortality with biomarkers among elderly Costa Ricans.

Peer-reviewed Publications

Stressors over the life course and neuroendocrine system dysregulation in Costa Rica [pdf]
Omer Gersten, William H. Dow, and Luis Rosero-Bixby
Journal of Aging and Health, 2010, 22(6):748-771
Neuroendocrine biomarkers, social relations, and the costs of cumulative stress in Taiwan [pdf]
Omer Gersten
Social Science & Medicine, 2008, 66(3):507-519
(Invited commentaries on the article and my response to the commentaries (i.e., rejoinder) are below)
The Cancer Transition in Japan since 1951 [pdf]
Omer Gersten and John R. Wilmoth
Demographic Research, 2002, 7(5):271-306

Invited Commentaries

The road travelled and the road ahead for the allostatic framework: a rejoinder on the framework's importance and the need for further work related to data, theory, and measurement [pdf]
Omer Gersten
Social Science & Medicine, 2008, 66(3):531-535

The rejoinder above was in response to Loucks, Juster, and Pruessner's commentary [pdf] and McDade's commentary [pdf] to my original Social Science & Medicine article.
Commentary: liver cancer and the epidemiological and cancer transition theories [pdf]
Omer Gersten
International Journal of Epidemiology, 2005, 34(2):403-4

I was invited to comment on Shibuya and Yano's paper [pdf] about liver cancer rates in Japan, which appears in the same issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Book Reviews

Book review: How and why species multiply: the radiation of Darwin's finches by Peter R. Grant and B. Rosemary Grant [pdf]
Omer Gersten
The European Legacy, 2009, 14(4):480-81
Book review: The selfish gene (30th Anniversary ed.) by Richard Dawkins [pdf]
Omer Gersten
The European Legacy, 2007, 12(6):762

Book Chapters

The adrenals and pituitary -- stress, adaptation, and longevity [pdf]
Paola S. Timiras and Omer Gersten
Physiological basis of aging and geriatrics, 4th edition (P.S. Timiras, ed.). 2007, pp. 137-57, New York: Informa Healthcare

Dissertation

Bridging the biological and social worlds: neuroendocrine biomarkers, social relations, and the costs of cumulative stress in Taiwan [pdf]
Omer Gersten
UC Berkeley, PhD Dissertation, 2005 (DAI 2006)

Since 08/07/2002:
Last modified: 05/01/2011