Arun Hendi

Associate Professor of Sociology

Arun S. Hendi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University and the co-director of the Migrant Mortality Database. He is a demographer who studies population growth and structure, American life expectancy, and racial and socioeconomic inequality. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, he served on the faculties of the University of Southern California and Princeton University. Professor Hendi’s recent work explores the fundamental causes of the black-white life expectancy gap, why educational differentials in mortality are widening, and the central role of immigration in reshaping U.S. life expectancy. His research has shown that racial residential segregation is the key driver of the large and newly widening black-white life expectancy gap. In his research on socioeconomic differentials in mortality, he has demonstrated that the cohort nature of educational expansions has produced widening socioeconomic inequalities in mortality. That work in turn led him to discover a new demographic phenomenon: the momentum of inequality, where inequality across education groups continues to widen even decades after the forces acting on inequality have ceased to change. In his most recent project, Professor Hendi and his colleagues have shown that without immigration, U.S. life expectancy would have been in freefall since the early 2000s, and that U.S. immigrants are now one of the populations with the highest life expectancies in the world. A unifying theme across his research has been the development of new formal demographic methods and techniques.

Professor Hendi has served as an expert advisor for the Congressional Budget Office and the Penn-Wharton Budget Model and his work has been supported by major grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institute on Aging. His work has been published in journals including Demography, Population and Development Review, The BMJ, Social Forces, and more.