Sanyu A. Mojola is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and Director of the Office of Population Research. 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 where 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.

Her research examines how societies produce health and illness. She is especially interested in how gender, race/ethnicity, aging and the life course and socio-economic status shape health outcomes. She has investigated how social processes and mechanisms within schools, communities, labor markets, cities and eco-systems can lead to health inequality. Her past and ongoing work primarily focuses on the HIV/AIDS pandemic as it unfolds in various settings such as Kenya, the United States and South Africa.

She has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Studies in Family Planning and a “Globalization in Everyday Life” Book Series at Stanford University Press. She has also served on the Board of Directors of Boulder County AIDS Project and as chair of its programs committee, and also served as a Council member of the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association.