Noreen Goldman is an American social scientist who is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Demography and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She studies social and economic factors and how they impact adult health. She was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024.
Goldman has spent her entire career at Princeton University, where she was made an Endowed Professor in 2007.[3] Her research combines demographic and epidemiological investigations into the impact of social and economic factors on adult health. Her early work considered the impact of marital status on health and mortality, revealing that widowed men had poorer life expectancies than widowed women.[4] Goldman analyzed the quality of data from the World Fertility Survey, which provided her with useful experience in survey design. She designed and led large-scale population surveys that investigate the causes of illness for women and children in rural communities.[5] She created an event history calendar to understand the timelines of maternal and child health in Guatemala, and investigated the social effects of health in Taiwan. She worked with cardiologists and molecular biologists to understand the cardiac health of children born in the 1990s, revealing that Black and Hispanic patients had considerably lower Life's Essential 8 scores than their white counterparts.[6]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Goldman studied the changing life expectancies of different groups in the United States.[7] She found that life expectancy of Hispanic Native Americans decreased by four years from 2019.[8] She demonstrated that the life expectancy of African American and Latino populations reduced by 3 – 4 times that of white people, and that the pandemic would reverse ten years of progress made toward closing gaps in life expectancy.[9] She went on to show that Filipino men had the largest decline in life expectancy of all Asian American groups.[10]
