Mara Getz Sheftel, PhD
PhD, CUNY Graduate Center
About Dr. Sheftel
Leadership & Core Faculty
Mara Getz Sheftel, Ph.D., is an Instructor at the Rutgers Center for State Health Policy. Dr. Sheftel also holds an appointment in the School of Public Health. Dr. Sheftel is a Sociologist and Demographer and focuses much of her work on drivers of older adult health disparities across the life course, focusing on immigrant legal status and work exposures. She is a part of the Scientific Leadership Team of the New Jersey Population Health Cohort Study (NJHealth). Dr. Sheftel is also a co-Investigator for the Legal Status Exposure, Health, and Kinship Networks project, a major project supported by an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health, investigating the implications of legal status on the health and well-being of older Latino immigrants in the US.
Dr. Sheftel’s research has been published in Demography, Population Research & Policy Review, the Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, and Socius, among other peer-reviewed journals. Prior to joining the Center in 2024, Dr. Sheftel served as a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State’s Population Research Institute and as a Research Affiliate at Princeton’s Office of Population Research. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center.