Dr. Jacob E. Cheadle is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He co-directs the Life in Frequencies Health Disparities (LifeHD) Research Lab with Dr. Bridget Goosby. His research focusses on the dynamics of social interaction and emotion. He employs a broad range of techniques to understand how our social experiences affect us, including ambulatory research methods integrating biosensors/biomarkers, passive data collection, and intensive survey designs, lab-based electrophysiological experiments, and social network analysis. His current research utilizes biosensors and daily diaries to characterize how racial discrimination affects individual’s emotional life and sets the stage for poor health earlier in life. A key theme in Dr. Cheadle’s research agenda is the deployment of new technologies that can be used to better capture both individual and social dynamics. He is currently developing techniques for real-time emotion tracking to more fully capture the ebb and flow of positive and negative emotions as we go about our lives. Understanding these dynamics is critical for describing stress and stress reactivity, as well as positive experiences and the ways they help us recover from adversity. Dr. Cheadle is particularly interested in how racism and interpersonal discrimination both increase negative emotions and stress, and decrease opportunities for positive and restorative social experiences. In another line of research, he is exploring the use of GPS to capture location-based social networks in order to facilitate identification of plausible social contact histories. His research has been supported by NIH and various other funders.

After completing his Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the Pennsylvania State University he was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Program Research Scholar (Cohort XII) at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in venues such as the Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, Demography, Journal of Marriage and Family, and elsewhere. In addition, Dr. Cheadle is among the first Sociologists to have employed neuroimaging to tackle challenging problems in social neuroscience and his work in this area has been published in NeuroImage, Social Cognitive and Affective Science, Social Neuroscience, and elsewhere.