Kathleen O'Connor

My research and teaching interests focus on variation in human fertility and mortality, and the biological, cultural, and environmental factors contributing to this variation. In my research on human fertility I examine age-related, population and individual-level variation in female reproductive function. My laboratory specializes in developing and optimizing collection methods and assays for population-level research in reproductive ecology. My research on human mortality has focused on the application of etiologic models of the age pattern of mortality to paleodemographic data. My newest research focuses on men’s health, with the overarching goal of understanding why men tend to have higher mortality across all ages of the lifespan, including in utero, than women.