Research Interests
Dr. Ghimire studies social change, developmental idealism, family and demography, population and environment dynamics. His research within family and demography revolves around three sub areas- marriage (marital arrangement, marital relationship and relationship dynamics), childbearing (timing of first birth), and fertility limitation (contraceptive use). In addition, he also studies reproductive health, HIV/AIDS and mental health and well-being. Another major area of Dr. Ghimire’s research focuses on understanding of the interplay between population and environmental processes (reciprocal impacts of population processes on land use and terrestrial biodiversity, and environmental degradation on childbearing, contraceptive use, individual mobility, household energy use). More recently his work has focused on ideational aspects of these substantive areas.

Dr. Axinn is professor of survey research, population studies, sociology and public policy at the University of Michigan. Axinn is a social demographer studying community, inter-generational, and social psychological influences on marriage, childbearing, reproductive health, mental health and the natural environment. He is former director of Michigan’s Survey Research Center with an active program of methodological research on longitudinal studies, survey data collection and mixed method studies. He is director of the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS), a 20-year, mixed method longitudinal study in Nepal and deputy director of the Michigan team implementing the U.S. National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) on behalf of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

Dr. Bhandari’s research focuses on the socioeconomic and cultural determinants of population health, migration, and fertility in developing countries, population and environment relationships, sociology of agriculture, rural social change, social research methods.

Humnath is an agricultural and environmental economist based in Bangladesh. He is leading a project on “Tracking Changes in Rural Poverty in Household and Village Economies in South Asia (Bangladesh). The main focus of the project is to study the development pathways in rural livelihoods and poverty in South Asia with the help of the farm household panel data collected in the region. Besides, he is involved in socioeconomic research activities of Cereal Systems Initiatives in South Asia (CSISA), Stress-Tolerant Rice for Rice Africa and Asia (STRASA), and Rice Variety Adoption and Monitoring Survey projects.

Dr. Thornton’s research focuses on issues related to health and education in developing countries and has involved field-experiments in Africa and South Asia. Current work includes examining how learning HIV results affect savings and investment behavior, measuring how financial incentives to stay HIV negative affect sexual behavior, and examining how menstruation affects education and labor force participation.