Kathleen Cagney was named the Director of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research in 2021. Professor Cagney's work examines social inequality and its relationship to health with a focus on neighborhood, race, aging, and the life course. She has developed a series of papers on neighborhood social capital and its relationship to outcomes such as self-rated health, asthma prevalence, physical activity, and mortality during the 1995 Chicago heat wave. She also focuses on the validity of such measures and the development of new neighborhood-based metrics that reflect the perceptions and experiences of older residents. She holds research professorships in ISR's Survey Research Center and the Population Studies Center.