Jennifer Karas Montez is a University Professor of Sociology, the Gerald B. Cramer Faculty Scholar in Aging Studies, and Co-Director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health Lab at Syracuse University. In addition, she is the Director of the Center for Aging and Policy Studies, an upstate New York consortium between Syracuse University, Cornell University, and University at Albany. Montez’s research investigates the troubling trends in adult mortality in the United States since the 1980s and the contribution of U.S. states’ diverging policy contexts to the trends. A major focus of her work has been explaining why the trends differ by gender and why they have been particularly worrisome for less-educated adults and adults living in states in the South and Midwest. Montez serves in several leadership roles in the profession. She is currently the Chair of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Section on the Sociology of Population and President-Elect of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science, and previous Chair of the ASA Section on Aging and the Life Course. Montez received a Ph.D. in Sociology with a Demography Specialization from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.S. in Statistics and B.S. in Mathematics from Purdue University. She received postdoctoral training in interdisciplinary public health as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University.