Cameron G. Beckett

Medical Sociologist · Dementia Care Research

I'm a TL1 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Health and the Social Sciences and the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. I study how family caregivers support people living with Alzheimer's and related dementias, asking how someone gets "good" at managing constant and evolving types of strain. My work combines in-depth interviews with quantitative analysis of national survey data, and I look at this topic cross-culturally, comparing how caregivers in Italy and the rural United States learn new skills, build expertise, and reformulate their own lives in the process. Methodologically, I work abductively, taking the frameworks that already govern a field and pressing them against the cases they were built to explain, until what they leave unspecified comes into view. The same logic carries into my quantitative work: my recent framework for caregiver flourishing, forthcoming in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, argues that dominant measures of caregiver burden fail to capture the expertise caregivers develop, and I am now testing whether that framework can be operationalized using data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project. I completed my PhD in Sociology at the University of Bologna in 2025. Outside of research, I occasionally write theater sketches and play banjo and harmonica (poorly).

Download CV ↗