Shelley Clark

Professor Clark is a demographer whose research focuses on gender, health, and life course transitions in sub-Saharan Africa. After receiving her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1999, Dr. Clark served as program associate at the Population Council in New York (1999 to 2002) and as an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago (2002 to 2006). In the summer of 2006, she joined the Department of Sociology at McGill. Prof. Clark is the founding Director of the Centre on Population Dynamics and also directs the CFI-funded Life History, Health, and HIV/AIDS data laboratory.

Much of her research examines how adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa make key transitions to adulthood in the midst of an on-going HIV/AIDS epidemic. In particular, her work has focused on how the transition into marriage shapes the risks of HIV/AIDS among young women in sub-Saharan Africa. She finds that for adolescent girls in many African countries, marriage does not provide a safe haven, showing instead that married adolescent girls are acutely vulnerable with respect to HIV. Additional research demonstrates how the process of searching for and finding a suitable spouse places both adolescent boys and girls at considerable risk. Through her current collaborative project with colleagues in Kenya, Burkina Faso, and South Africa, she is exploring the implications of single motherhood on women’s poverty and children’s health over the life course. Her findings have been published in leading journals, such as Demography, Population and Development Review, Social Forces, and Journal of Marriage and Family, and presented to policy makers at influential international organizations, including the World Bank, WHO, UNFPA/UNICEF, and the Population Council.