Shannon M. Monnat

Shannon Monnat is the Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health, director of the Center for Policy Research, and professor of sociology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Monnat is a rural demographer and population health scholar whose research examines trends and geographic differences in health and mortality, with a special interest in rural health and health disparities. She is a leading national expert on structural and spatial determinants of drug overdose and other deaths of despair. Her most recent research has focused on geographic differences in COVID-19 experiences and impacts.

She has published over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and she regularly writes policy briefs for non-academic audiences. Monnat has been the PI or co-investigator on externally funded projects totaling over $12 million, including from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Justice, United States Department of Agriculture, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Institute for New Economic Thinking.

She currently leads a NIDA-funded project to examine the effects of state’s COVID-19 mitigation policies on working-age adult psychological well-being, drug overdose, and suicide and co-leads an NIA-funded project on how state policies and county economic conditions have jointly contributed to the large and growing geographic disparities in midlife mortality, psychosocial wellbeing, and health behaviors in the U.S.

Monnat teaches courses in demographic processes and health and place.