Diminished returns of neighborhood cohesion for self-rated health
The health return on neighborhood cohesion is smaller for racially and ethnically minoritized adults than for White adults.
SDOHDisparities
Muntasir Masum, PhD
Assistant Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatistics
I study alcohol epidemiology, social determinants of health, and machine learning for population health — building open, reproducible workflows that turn large public-health surveys into evidence for policy.
11
Peer-reviewed
3
Grants as PI
8
Students mentored
Research
Population health, decoded
Alcohol, social determinants, and life-course health using large national surveys — NHIS, BRFSS, Add Health, HRS.
Explore research →Studio
Visualizations & tools
Data visualizations from my research, open R workflows and apps, and the occasional experiment.
Enter the studio →Teaching
Methods, taught clearly
Graduate epidemiology and statistical inference at UAlbany — EPI 501, EPI 553 — plus Alcohol, Society & Health.
Courses →Selected publications
View all →The weight of place: neighborhood disadvantage & obesity trajectories
Adolescents in more disadvantaged neighborhoods more often followed an obese-accelerating BMI trajectory into early midlife.
SDOHLife course
Does staying put protect? Neighborhood cohesion, residence & drinking
The protective tie between neighborhood cohesion and lower-risk drinking strengthens the longer adults stay put.
SDOHAlcohol epi
Alcohol and binge drinking frequency and hypertension
Both frequent and binge drinking independently tracked with higher hypertension prevalence across a national U.S. sample.
Alcohol epiCardiometabolic
News
All →Aug 2026Published E3 Practices: Teaching Enhancement, a manual of eleven evidence-based teaching practices from the E3 fellowship.
Aug 2026Accepted into the NIH Early Career Reviewer (ECR) Program at the Center for Scientific Review.
Jul 2026Named an AI & Society Research Fellow (co-funded by the Institute for Social and Health Equity) and a Faculty Innovation Fellow for 2026–27.
Jul 2026Paper accepted at Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities on diminished returns of neighborhood cohesion for self-rated health.
Jun 2026Awarded the AI Plus Institute Agentic AI Seed Grant (PI) to harmonize BRFSS data.
Mar 2026SUNY AI Platform Award ($100K) to model early-midlife cardiovascular risk with ML.
2026New paper in Annals of Epidemiology on neighborhood disadvantage and obesity trajectories into midlife.
2026New paper in Alcohol & Alcoholism on neighborhood cohesion and drinking.
2026Invited talk at the UAlbany AI Plus Symposium.
Currently
- ›Building an open, reproducible agentic-AI pipeline to harmonize the BRFSS — my AI Plus seed-grant project.
- ›Writing Alcohol Intelligence, my newsletter on alcohol, health, and population data.
Prospective students & collaborators
I welcome inquiries from students and collaborators interested in alcohol epidemiology, social determinants of health, and applied machine learning.