Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, September 14, 2009

Maxwell School Professor Leonard Lopoo Receives National Institutes of Health Grant as Part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $70,337 grant to Leonard Lopoo, associate professor of public administration at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, for his project titled “The Health Consequences of Teenage Childbearing.” This award is funded through the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and is supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

Lopoo’s research will focus on the health outcomes for teen mothers and their children, filling in gaps that exist in the currently available data. He says that current research on teenage childbearing, which has long argued that young mothers and their children are disadvantaged simply because of the age of the mother, may be outdated. More recent research suggests that the relationship between teenage childbearing and various negative outcomes might be less a result of the fact that these women bear children at a young age and, instead, more a result of other unmeasured characteristics, such as low socioeconomic status.

Lopoo will create an entirely new data set as he investigates the consequences of births at different ages on the health of the mother and her child. His data set will be based on information collected before and immediately after the birth to control for factors that have made the previous research problematic. This valuable data will be useful both for future research in social policy, as well as for policymakers.

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The Maxwell School of Syracuse University is the premier academic institution in the United States committed to scholarship, civic leadership, and education in public and international affairs. Maxwell is home to Syracuse University’s social science departments and to numerous nationally recognized multidisciplinary graduate programs in public policy, international studies, social policy, and conflict resolution. Maxwell's graduate program in public administration -- the first of its kind in the nation -- is ranked consistently the leading graduate public affairs program in the country.