Evelina Akimova

Specialization: Social demography & genomics; family demography; gene–environment interplay; sleep & mental well-being; social stratification; life course; causal inference

Bio: Dr. Evelina Akimova is a sociologist specializing in social demography and genomics. Her research examines how genetic differences and social environments jointly shape demographic, socioeconomic, and health outcomes across the life course. Her work spans family demography, social stratification, sleep and mental well-being, and gene–environment interplay, with a particular interest in understanding how social contexts condition genetic associations and how individual characteristics can, in turn, shape family and social environments.

A second strand of Dr. Akimova’s research focuses on methodological questions at the intersection of sociology, demography, and computational genomics. Her work examines causal inference, gene–environment dependencies, collider bias, and sample selection, as well as the use and interpretation of polygenic scores in social science research. She uses large-scale genomic and longitudinal data, surveys, accelerometry, and computational and statistical methods to study these questions.

Dr. Akimova earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Oxford in 2021. Before joining Purdue University in 2024, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Biosocial Research at the University of Oxford, with the Department of Sociology, the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, and Nuffield College. She remains an Associate Member of Nuffield College.