Sanyu A. Mojola is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and the Maurice P. During Professor of Demographic Studies. She directed the Office of Population Research from July 2020-June 2024. She earned a first class joint honors BA degree from Durham University, UK, and a PhD from the University of Chicago where her dissertation won the Richard Saller Dissertation Prize given to the graduate whose dissertation is the most distinguished piece of scholarship across the Social Science Division of the University of Chicago in a given year. She was previously on the faculty of Sociology at the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado Boulder. At CU-Boulder, she was a Gamm Teaching Fellow and was chosen as Faculty Mentor of the Year by sociology graduate students. She has also been a Hutchins Fellow at the Du Bois Research Institute in the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a fellow at the WIssenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany.  

Her mixed methods research examines how societies produce health and illness, with a particular focus on the HIV/AIDS pandemic as it unfolds in various settings such as Kenya, South Africa and the US. She has investigated how social dynamics within schools, communities, labor markets, cities and eco-systems can lead to health inequality. She is especially interested in how the life course, gender, race/ethnicity and socio-economic status shape health outcomes. 

Her first book, Love, Money and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS (University of California Press, 2014) examining the HIV pandemic among young African women, with a focus on Kenya, won multiple awards including the 2016 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award (Best Book of the Year) from the American Sociological Association. Her second book, “Death by Design: Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol” focused on Washington D.C, US. is forthcoming in 2025 with University of California Press. She has also been Principal Investigator of an NIH funded project called HIV after 40 in rural South Africa: Aging in the Context of an HIV/AIDS epidemic. Her team investigated the causes and consequences of the HIV epidemic among middle-aged and older adults as they aged in rural post-apartheid South Africa. The project will be the subject of her next book along with the team. Her work has also appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Gender and Society, Demography, Social Science and Medicine and Journal of Marriage and Family. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Studies in Family Planning, and is currently serving on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review and Population and Development Review.