A central question of my research program is how early-life social environments shape health trajectories long before chronic disease manifests. This project investigates school contexts during childhood and adolescence as a key structural context where inequities are reproduced and biologically inscribed. Schools are policy-structured environments that influence youths’ daily experiences of stress, opportunity, and social belonging in ways that may have long-lasting physiological consequences for aging and chronic disease.
Current Work
The foundation of this project is a study published in Social Science & Medicine demonstrating that manifestations of structural racism in primary school contexts (e.g., school-level racial segregation, concentrated disadvantage, racial gaps in school discipline) are associated with accelerated epigenetic aging among Black but not White youth in the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study. These findings using epigenetic clocks suggest that early-life exposure to educational inequities and disadvantaged school contexts may be an important driver of later-life health risks and racial disparities in morbidity and mortality.
Future Directions
Ongoing work extends these findings in several directions. Using new waves of FFCWS data as the cohort ages into adulthood, I am examining whether the epigenetic risks documented in adolescence persist, attenuate, or accumulate into early adulthood, and whether they are associated with downstream chronic disease outcomes, including cognitive aging and neurodegeneration. A related line of inquiry moves upstream to examine specific structural drivers of these associations — particularly school finance systems and the distribution of educational resources across communities — as modifiable policy-level targets for intervention.
Selected Publications
Martz CD, Benner AD, Goosby BJ, Mitchell C, Gaydosh L. (2024). Structural racism in primary schools and changes in epigenetic age acceleration among Black and White youth. Social Science & Medicine, 347(116724).
Del Toro J, Martz CD, Freilich CD, Rea-Sandin G, Markon K, Cole S, Krueger RF, Wilson S. (2024). Longitudinal changes in epigenetic age acceleration across childhood and adolescence. JAMA Pediatrics, 178(12):1298–1306.
Additional manuscripts under review and in preparation.
Connor D. Martz, PhD 