Rate My Professor Sharon Christ

Sharon L. Christ is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science and Statistics at Purdue University’s College of Health and Human Sciences, with a joint appointment in Statistics and courtesy appointments in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. She joined Purdue in 2010 as Assistant Professor, promoted to Associate Professor in 2017, and has served as Co-Director of The Methodology Center at Purdue (MCAP) since 2019. Prior to Purdue, Christ was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Developmental Science (2008-2010) and Research Statistician at UNC’s Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (2004-2008). She earned her PhD in Sociology (2008), MS in Statistics (2004), and MA in Sociology (2002) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in Sociology and Political Science (magna cum laude, 1994) from the University of Minnesota.

Christ’s research focuses on advanced quantitative methodologies applied to social, behavioral, and health sciences, with emphasis on human health and development processes across the lifespan, including adolescent development, child maltreatment, aging, and language disorders. Her expertise encompasses structural equation modeling, multilevel and longitudinal modeling, survival analysis, and complex survey data analysis. Notable projects include evaluating child maltreatment’s impacts on adolescent academic achievement, aggression, and mental health using large U.S. cohort studies, and collaborations on military family resilience, developmental language disorders, and aphasia treatments. As Co-Investigator, she contributes to NIH- and DoD-funded grants exceeding $10 million. Christ holds editorial positions as Editor of Longitudinal and Life Course Studies’ Methodology Section (2023-present) and Statistical Consulting Editor for Child Development (2021-present). Her scholarship, with over 5,700 Google Scholar citations and an h-index of 44, influences the field through methodological innovations and interdisciplinary collaborations. Select publications: “Long-term trajectories of depressive symptoms by military affiliation” (SSM-Population Health, 2025, with Coppola et al.); “Learning Verbs in Sentences: Children With Developmental Language Disorder and the Role of Retrieval Practice” (Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2024, with Leonard et al.); “Military service and sociodemographic determinants of depressive symptom trajectories” (Social Science Research, 2024, with Coppola et al.). Awards include University Faculty Scholar (2022-present), Christine M. Ladisch Faculty Leadership Award (2022), Faculty Leadership Academy for Interdisciplinary Research Fellow (2020), and Center for Aging and the Life Course Outstanding Professor Award (2014).