Basic Information

Name: Sunkanmi Folorunsh
(Aug 1995–）

Birth
Location: Unknown

Title: Research scientist

Affiliation: University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Honor: Recipient of the 2026 Graduate Student Prize for Scholarly Work, African and African American Studie

I. Brief Introduction

Sunkanmi Folorunsho is a sociologist of aging and health whose research examines how social structures shape mental health, cognition, and care outcomes in later life, with sustained attention to African and African diaspora populations. He is a doctoral candidate and instructor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he works under the supervision of Professor Lisa Kort-Butler, and he also holds an affiliation with Kwara State Polytechnic in Ilorin, Nigeria.

His scholarship is deliberately interdisciplinary, drawing on sociology, public health, gerontology, and African diaspora studies. This orientation reflects a conviction that the questions that matter most in the study of aging cannot be answered from within a single discipline. Why some older adults withdraw from medical care, why financial insecurity registers as depression decades later, and why cognitive decline follows the contours of social disadvantage are all questions that cut across sociology, medicine, and policy at once. To date he has authored or co-authored approximately twenty-five peer-reviewed publications, which have accumulated more than two hundred citations and an h-index of eight.

Alongside his research, Folorunsho teaches undergraduate sociology fully online at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, serving as instructor of record for Families and Society (SOCI 226) and Health, Medicine and Society (SOCI 252). He is an active contributor to the scholarly infrastructure of his fields, having served as a peer reviewer for more than forty journals, holding a Reviewing Editor role with Springer Nature, and participating in the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Global Burden of Disease Collaborator Network.

II. Story about Notable Contributions

Folorunsho’s research program developed along two converging tracks. The first is theoretical. His framework of Ecologies of Exposure and Resistance, published in Theory & Psychology, offered a way of holding together two facts that are often treated separately: that marginalized populations are disproportionately exposed to structural harm, and that they simultaneously generate resources of resistance that shape how that harm is metabolized. The framework has since informed how he approaches empirical questions about disadvantage and later-life wellbeing.

The second track is empirical and quantitative, built largely on large longitudinal datasets including the Health and Retirement Study. Working with these data, he has investigated why older adults disengage from routine medical care; how distance vision impairment predicts trajectories of cognitive decline independent of depressive symptoms, using multilevel growth curve models; how wealth shocks push retirees back into the labor force; and how orientations toward the financial future shape depressive trajectories in later life. A parallel body of review scholarship extends the structural argument outward, examining climate grief as a social determinant of mental health, urban heat islands and nature-based responses to them, rural residency during post-COVID-19 recovery, and the displacement of residents through neighbourhood revitalisation.

This work has been recognized institutionally. 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, the Alice Frosh Howard Graduate Student Research Fellowship, and the Dan Hoyt Graduate Student Publication Award, which he had also received in 2025.

III. Principal Publications and Works

His theoretical contribution, Ecologies of Exposure and Resistance, appeared in Theory & Psychology and represents his most conceptually ambitious work. Among his empirical publications, a 2026 article in the Journal of Aging and Health asks why older adults disengage from routine medical care, treating disengagement as a patterned social process rather than individual noncompliance.

His collaborative work spans mental health intervention, cognition, and global health disparities. A systematic review in Clinical Gerontologist assessed immersive virtual reality as a means of promoting mental health among older adults. In the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, he and colleagues examined how resilience shields against, while grit intensifies, subjective cognitive decline among middle-to-older aged Black Americans, a finding that complicates the assumption that all psychological strengths protect equally. A qualitative systematic review in Ethnicity & Health examined determinants of cervical cancer screening among African and African American women, extending his diaspora-focused agenda into cancer prevention.

IV. Implications for the Sciences

The through-line of Folorunsho’s work is a refusal to locate the causes of later-life disadvantage in the choices of older adults themselves. Disengagement from care, cognitive decline, and depressive trajectories are treated as outcomes of exposure to financial precarity, displacement, heat, and discrimination, rather than as failures of individual management. This reframing carries direct policy implications, since it relocates the point of intervention from patient behavior to the structures that pattern it.

Equally significant is his insistence on studying aging comparatively across the United States, continental Africa, and the African diaspora. Gerontology has historically been built on data from high-income Western populations, and findings drawn from those populations are routinely generalized. By working across these contexts and collaborating with researchers based in Nigeria, Folorunsho contributes to a gerontology capable of distinguishing what is general about human aging from what is an artifact of where it happened to be studied.