Ryan Thombs

Ryan Thombs is an assistant professor of rural sociology at Penn State University. His research focuses on the political economy of the climate crisis, its impacts on health and well-being, and how social inequality affects population health outcomes using advanced statistical methods. He is currently working on three projects. The first explores the effects of fossil fuel sector decline on a range of environmental and population health measures such as emissions, air pollution, mental health, mortality, and economic well-being sub-nationally in the U.S. The second analyzes the anthropogenic drivers of greenhouse gas emissions focusing on the relationship between militarization and emissions and evaluating the mitigation effectiveness of current climate policies. His last project is focused on developing new approaches and software packages for panel, time series, and spatial modeling. His published research appears in leading sociology journals such as the American Sociological Review, Sociological Methodology, Social Problems, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Socius, and various high impact interdisciplinary journals, including Global Environmental Change, Energy Research & Social Science, Climatic Change, PLOS Climate, and Environmental Research Letters.