Melanie Brasher is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Rhode Island. She holds a master's and Ph.D. from Duke University. She is a demographer and expert in population aging whose research includes unintended births and health. She is particularly interested in the impact of economic disparities, social support, and community context on the health and well being of older adults in China. As a grad student at Duke, she was a National Institute on Aging pre-doctoral trainee for social and medical demography of aging. She also served as a visiting scholar at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing in 2011, and continues to collaborate with public health researchers on investigations of risk factors and health among elderly Chinese.