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1. Brief Introduction

Sunkanmi Folorunsho is a researcher in aging, health, and social inequality whose work examines how social and economic conditions shape mental health, cognition, healthcare access, and wellbeing in later life. He is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he works under the supervision of Professor Lisa Kort-Butler and serves as an Instructor of Record and Graduate Teaching Assistant. His research draws from gerontology, medical sociology, public health, mental health research, and the study of racial and socioeconomic inequality, with particular attention to older adults, Black populations, and African and African diaspora communities.

Much of Folorunsho's research begins with questions that appear individual but are rooted in wider social conditions. Why do some older adults disengage from routine medical care even when they continue to have health needs? How do wealth and financial insecurity affect mental health in later life? Why do cognitive outcomes differ across racial and socioeconomic groups? What happens when older adults have limited family, financial, or community resources to rely on? These questions guide a research program concerned not only with whether inequalities exist, but also with how they are produced and sustained across the life course.

His academic training provides a strong methodological foundation for this work. His master's thesis examined household wealth and mental health among older adults across racial and ethnic groups, with particular attention to the role of social support. His methodological experience includes longitudinal and multilevel modeling, survey analysis, regression methods, structural equation modeling, and reproducible quantitative research using Stata, SPSS, Mplus, R, and SQL. He is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Mixed Methods Research. His current publication record includes 22 peer reviewed journal articles covering healthcare disengagement, cognitive health, depressive symptoms, social support, multimorbidity, obesity, hospice utilization, disability, HIV and aging, dementia stigma, elder abuse, oral health, healthcare affordability, and other dimensions of health and aging.

An important feature of Folorunsho's scholarship is its attention to populations and settings that remain underrepresented in much of the aging and health literature. His research includes older adults in the United States, older Black Americans, Nigerian populations, African immigrants, and populations across Sub Saharan Africa. Working across these settings allows him to examine how aging is shaped by race, wealth, family resources, healthcare systems, social relationships, culture, and place. It also allows him to ask whether explanations developed from one population or healthcare system can be assumed to apply equally well elsewhere.

Teaching and mentorship are also central to his academic work. At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Folorunsho has designed and taught Families and Society and Health, Medicine, and Society as Instructor of Record. His teaching connects sociological ideas with everyday questions about family life, health, medicine, inequality, and social institutions. He also mentors high school and undergraduate students through the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition Mentorship Program and was recognized as Mentor of the Month in 2025.

Folorunsho contributes actively to academic service and scientific collaboration. He has completed more than 50 verified peer reviews for journals across aging, public health, mental health, sociology, and related fields. He serves as a Reviewing Editor with the Springer Nature Reviewer Community and participates in the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Global Burden of Disease Collaborator Network. His academic work therefore extends across research, teaching, mentorship, peer review, and collaborative scientific activity.

2. Story of Notable Contributions

Folorunsho's research is driven by a continuing interest in how unequal social conditions become unequal health outcomes. His work does not assume that poor health, psychological distress, cognitive difficulties, or limited healthcare use can be adequately explained by individual behavior. Instead, he examines the economic, social, racial, relational, and institutional conditions that shape what people experience before these outcomes become visible.

This perspective is especially clear in his Ecologies of Exposure and Resistance framework, published in Theory & Psychology. The framework addresses a tension in research on marginalized populations. Communities experiencing social disadvantage are often studied primarily through their exposure to poverty, discrimination, environmental hazards, inadequate healthcare, and other forms of structural inequality. Research on resilience, by contrast, may focus strongly on how people cope with adversity without giving equal attention to why some groups are repeatedly required to cope with greater adversity in the first place. Folorunsho's framework brings these concerns into the same conversation by examining both exposure to structural harm and the resources people use to respond to it.

This approach avoids reducing marginalized populations to vulnerability while also avoiding an overly celebratory view of resilience. Families, communities, social relationships, cultural resources, and personal strengths can help people navigate difficult circumstances, but the ability to cope does not make unequal conditions less important. The framework therefore encourages researchers to study both the production of disadvantage and the resources through which people respond to it.

His empirical work on healthcare disengagement reflects this same interest. In the Journal of Aging and Health, Folorunsho and Darlingtina Esiaka examine why older adults disengage from routine medical care. Rather than treating missed care simply as a matter of poor compliance or lack of personal responsibility, the study considers psychological distress and wealth stratification as part of the explanation. The question becomes not simply why an older adult failed to attend care, but what social and psychological circumstances may have made continued engagement with healthcare more difficult.

His research on cognitive health among Black Americans follows a similar path. In the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, Folorunsho and colleagues examined resilience, grit, and subjective cognitive decline among middle to older aged Black Americans. The study found that resilience and grit did not operate in the same way. Resilience appeared protective, while grit intensified subjective cognitive decline. This finding complicates the common assumption that characteristics associated with perseverance are always beneficial. It raises a more careful question about what persistence means when people are navigating prolonged social, economic, or health related strain.

His collaborative work published in Alzheimer's & Dementia examines social engagement in relation to cognitive functioning, depressive symptoms, and restless sleep among older Black adults. Here, cognition is studied within the social and emotional environment of later life rather than as an isolated neurological process. Social connection, sleep, emotional wellbeing, and cognitive functioning can intersect in ways that become particularly important when studying populations whose experiences of aging have also been shaped by racial and socioeconomic inequality.

Economic inequality is another recurring concern in Folorunsho's scholarship. His graduate research on household wealth and mental health reflects an interest in resources accumulated across the life course. Wealth can capture years of employment opportunity, home ownership, savings, debt, inheritance, discrimination, and access to institutions in ways that current income cannot fully represent. This is particularly important in later life, when accumulated resources often determine how comfortably people can respond to illness, disability, retirement, caregiving needs, and unexpected financial shocks.

A substantial part of his research also examines aging and health among African and African diaspora populations. His publications address aging with HIV in Nigeria, social determinants of multimorbidity among older adults in Sub Saharan Africa, poverty and healthcare affordability, access to dental care among older adults, dementia stigma among Nigerian men, and the role of formal social networks in reducing mental stress among older adults living in poverty. These studies address health problems that are often examined through clinical measures while giving greater attention to the social environments in which those problems are experienced.

His work on masculinity and memory loss provides a good example. Dementia is a neurological condition, but the experience of memory loss is also shaped by how families and communities understand independence, competence, masculinity, aging, and social status. By examining dementia stigma among Nigerian men, the research shows why cultural expectations matter for understanding how symptoms are interpreted, disclosed, and managed.

Folorunsho has also extended this interest in inequality and healthcare access to women's health. His qualitative systematic review in Ethnicity & Health examines determinants of cervical cancer screening among African and African American women. Related work considers disparities in cervical cancer research involving African immigrant women in the United States. These studies ask why preventive services remain unevenly used and why some populations remain less visible in the research literature despite carrying important health needs.

His research has received recognition through several awards and fellowships. In 2026, he received the Graduate Student Prize for Scholarly Work from the African and African American Studies Program in the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He received the Dan Hoyt Graduate Student Publication Award in both 2025 and 2026 and the Alice Frosh Howard Graduate Student Research Fellowship in 2026. His other honors include the Nicholas Babchuk Graduate Student Research Award, the David C. and Marilyn S. Moore Quantitative Research Award, the Scott C. Whiteford Graduate Student Award, and an ICPSR scholarship for advanced training in multilevel and longitudinal modeling.

3. Principal Publications and Works

Folorunsho's scholarship includes theoretical work, quantitative population research, qualitative research, systematic reviews, and evidence synthesis. Selected publications include:

1. Ecologies of Exposure and Resistance: A Novel Framework for Understanding Health Inequalities in Marginalized Communities. Theory & Psychology.

2. Why Do Older Adults Disengage from Routine Medical Care? Psychological Distress, Wealth Stratification, and Health System Disengagement in Later Life. Journal of Aging and Health.

3. Resilience Shields and Grit Intensifies Subjective Cognitive Decline in Middle to Older Aged Black Americans. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

4. Social Engagement Moderates the Relationship Between Cognitive Functioning, Depressive Symptoms, and Restless Sleep in Older Black Adults. Alzheimer's & Dementia.

5. Immersive Virtual Reality to Promote Mental Health in Older Adults: A Systematic Review. Clinical Gerontologist.

6. Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in Hospice Utilization Among Older Adults in the United States. American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Care.

7. Masculinity and Mental Health in Later Life in Sub Saharan Africa: A Review of Recent Literature. Sociology Compass.

8. Functional Impairment Without Depression Diagnosis as an Indicator of Psychological Distress in Older Adults. Cambridge Prisms: Global Mental Health.

9. Household Income and Obesity Among Older Adults: The Moderating Role of Race in a Longitudinal Analysis. BMC Public Health.

10. Social Determinants of Multimorbidity in Older Adults in Sub Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review. Palliative & Supportive Care.

11. Aging With HIV in Nigeria: A Narrative Review of Multimorbidity and Healthcare Access Challenges. Health Science Reports.

12. Masculinity and Memory Loss: A Qualitative Study of the Social Stigma of Dementia Among Nigerian Men. Aging & Mental Health.

13. The Role of Formal Social Networks in Mitigating Age Related Mental Stress Among Older Nigerians Living in Poverty: Insights from Social Capital Theory. Global Mental Health.

14. The Impact of Neglect, Physical, and Financial Abuse on Mental Health Among Older Adults: A Systematic Review. Aging & Mental Health.

15. The Role of Social Determinants of Health in Shaping Racial and Disability Disparities Among Older Adults in the United States. Journal of Aging & Social Policy.

16. Determinants of Cervical Cancer Screening Among African and African American Women: A Qualitative Systematic Review. Ethnicity & Health.

His current research includes work on social disconnection and health, aging without family support, perceived survival expectations and health behavior, and the relationship between neighborhood conditions, social cohesion, sleep, and cognitive functioning.

4. Implications for the Sciences

Folorunsho's work encourages researchers to look beyond the individual when explaining health and aging. Older adults make choices about healthcare, finances, relationships, and daily life, but those choices are made within very different social circumstances. Wealth affects the range of options available to people. Race can influence exposure to discrimination and the treatment people receive within institutions. Family structure affects whether someone has help during illness or disability. Neighborhood conditions influence mobility, stress, safety, and access to resources. Healthcare systems affect whether care is affordable, accessible, continuous, and easy to navigate.

This perspective changes how familiar health problems can be understood. An older adult who stops attending routine medical appointments may be described as noncompliant, but that explanation tells us little about whether the person is experiencing financial hardship, psychological distress, transportation problems, mobility limitations, mistrust, or difficulty navigating the healthcare system. A person experiencing depression following financial loss may appear unable to cope, but the financial loss may sit on top of decades of unequal opportunities to accumulate savings, housing wealth, retirement benefits, and other resources. Cognitive decline can be described clinically, but clinical description alone does not explain why some groups reach later life with greater exposure to chronic stress, illness, economic disadvantage, or limited access to quality care.

Folorunsho's research therefore pushes inquiry further back in the chain of events. What happened before someone disengaged from healthcare? What conditions shaped the financial resources available when illness occurred? What relationships were available before a person became socially isolated? What kinds of support existed when a family began caring for an older relative? How did earlier experiences with work, race, poverty, healthcare, and community life affect the resources available in old age? These questions help move research from describing inequalities to understanding how they develop.

His work across the United States, Black American populations, Nigeria, African immigrants, and Sub Saharan Africa is also relevant to the development of gerontology and public health. Much of the evidence used to understand aging has historically come from high income Western populations. That evidence remains essential, but aging does not occur under the same social conditions everywhere. Family responsibilities, healthcare systems, social protection, gender expectations, economic security, cultural beliefs, and access to formal care vary widely across societies.

Research across different settings can therefore reveal where existing theories work well and where they require greater attention to context. Social support may have different consequences when families carry most of the responsibility for elder care. The experience of dementia stigma may change when memory loss interacts with particular cultural expectations about masculinity, competence, or independence. Healthcare access means something different in a setting where most costs are protected by insurance than in one where families may have to finance a greater share of care themselves. These differences are not obstacles to comparison. They are part of what comparison can teach us.

This approach also has clear implications for health policy. If disparities in later life are partly produced by differences in wealth, healthcare access, social relationships, neighborhood conditions, discrimination, and institutional support, then individual behavior change cannot be the only response. Health education is valuable, but its impact is limited when people cannot afford care or reach services. Encouraging older adults to remain socially engaged may have little effect when mobility difficulties, transportation problems, unsafe neighborhoods, or the loss of close relationships make engagement difficult. Encouraging people to become more resilient cannot substitute for addressing the conditions that repeatedly expose some populations to greater hardship.

The Ecologies of Exposure and Resistance framework speaks directly to this problem. People do respond to hardship through family relationships, community support, personal strengths, social networks, cultural resources, and other forms of resistance. Those responses deserve serious attention. At the same time, resilience should not become a reason to overlook the structures that create unequal exposure to adversity. Studying both sides allows health research to recognize human agency without shifting responsibility for structural inequality onto the people most affected by it.

Folorunsho's research on mental health, cognition, healthcare use, social engagement, poverty, disability, multimorbidity, and care therefore contributes to a broader understanding of aging as a social as well as a biological process. Differences observed in later life often have histories. They reflect resources accumulated or denied over many years, relationships strengthened or lost, institutions encountered, environments inhabited, and opportunities that were never equally distributed. Understanding those histories is essential for explaining why people who reach the same stage of life can experience aging in very different ways.