Stephanie Koning

Stephanie Koning is a National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein Individual Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, IL. She is a social epidemiologist and demographer with primary interests in biosocial determinants of maternal and child health; structural violence and social stress; and the health implications of migration and displacement. She has led or co-led multiple data collection projects using survey, interview, and ethnographic methods, and uses quantitative analytical techniques from biostatistics, machine learning, and quasi-experimental design. Her work focuses on global health and inequities, particularly in North American and Southeast Asian settings.

Dr. Koning received her PhD in Population Health, with a concentration in Epidemiology and MS in Sociology, from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a researcher with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Bangkok and the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute, Thailand. Her most recent work examines how intersectionality can inform the study of social disparities in prenatal stress and birth outcomes within the United States, how human rights violations and violence against women shape health disparities in displacement-affected populations, and how family planning and fertility declines in Indonesia have boosted human capital formation through child health and development gains across a generation. 

She is currently a member of the biological anthropology lab at Northwestern University and is involved in multiple ongoing research projects. This includes work with a multidisciplinary team at Northwestern to study the role of early life stress and chronic inflammation in US population health disparities and birth outcomes. She also continues to work on research stemming from her dissertation, in which she designed and implemented a survey of over 800 mother-child dyads to investigate the biosocial determinants of maternal and child health in a population affected by violence and displacement at the Thai-Myanmar border. 

Dr. Koning is a former NIH predoctoral fellow in demography and has published solo and co-authored work in peer-reviewed journals that include Social Science & Medicine and Demography.