Overview
Álvaro is a sociologist and demographer who studies how environmental hazards contribute to the reproduction of social inequality and the pathways that drive vulnerability to climate change, with a focus on health outcomes. To do this, he draws on sociological and demographic theory, and quantitative and computational methods.
His dissertation examines how environmental conditions—particularly heat and disasters—affect violence against women, and how social connectedness at multiple scales shapes health vulnerability during heat waves. He uses Spain as a case study, leveraging a wide range of publicly available data sources as well as primary data that he collected from the first two heat waves of the summer of 2025. You can learn more about these projects on his personal website.
Prior to joining Cornell, Álvaro researched how the emergence and spread of vector-borne and contagious diseases can lead to inequalities in health outcomes. He also studied how the COVID-19 pandemic lead to inequalities in mobility patterns and knowledge production.
His research has been published in Scientific Reports, Social Science & Medicine, Population, Space, and Place, and PLOS One.
Dissertation Committee:
Vida Maralani (Chair), Matt Hall, John Zinda, Peter Rich (UW-Madison), John R. B. Palmer (Pompeu Fabra University, Spain).
Selected Publications:
Padilla-Pozo, Á., Bartumeus, F., Montalvo, T., Sanpera-Calbet, I., Valsecchi, A., & Palmer, JRB (2024). Assessing and Correcting Neighborhood Socioeconomic Spatial Sampling Biases in Citizen Science Mosquito Data Collection. Scientific Reports, 14, 22462. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-73416-6
Padilla-Pozo, Á., Torrado, J.M. & Palomares-Linares, I., & Duque-Calvache, R. Unique times, unequal mobilities: daily mobility during the de-escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic (2023). Population, Space and Place. E2662, 29 (5). https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2662