Katharine M. Donato

Donald G. Herzberg Professor of International Migration

Katharine M. Donato

Donald G. Herzberg Professor of International Migration

Katharine Donato is the Donald G. Herzberg Professor of International Migration and former Director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She has examined many research questions related to migration, including the economic consequences of U.S. immigration policy; health consequences of migration; immigrant parent involvement in schools in New York, Chicago, and Nashville; deportation and its effects for immigrants; the great recession and its consequences for Mexican workers; U.S. legal visa system; and refugee and migrant integration. Her first book, Gender and International Migration: From Slavery to Present, was co-authored with Donna Gabaccia and published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2015. Several years later, together with Elizabeth Ferris, she co-authored a second book, Refugees, Migration and Global Governance: Negotiating the Global Compacts, published by Routledge in 2019. Professor Donato has also co-edited 8 refereed journal issues and published more than 90 refereed journal articles and book chapters.

Since 2015, she has received funding for collaborative projects from the Mexican Human Rights Commission, National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and the GHR Foundation. Currently, she is the Principal Investigator on an RSF-funded project that examines the assimilation and mobility transitions of immigrant adults who entered the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor. She is also a co-PI on an NSF-funded project that examines how environmental stressors affect out-migration and the health of families in southwestern Bangladesh. Dr. Donato was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation during the 2017-2018 academic year. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, she was on the faculty of Vanderbilt and Rice Universities.

Selected Recent Publications

  • Kripalani, Sunil, Kathryn Goggins, Catherine Couey, Vivian M. Yeh, Katharine M. Donato, John Schnelle and Kenneth A. Wallston. 2021. “Disparities in Research Participation by Level of Health Literacy.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 96(2): 314-321.
  • Donato, Katharine M. and Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes. 2020. “The Legal Landscape of U.S. Immigration: An Introduction.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 6(3): 1-17 (November). https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/6/3/1.abstract
  • Carrico, Amanda, Katharine M. Donato, Jonathan Gillian and Kelsey Best. 2020. “Extreme Weather and Marriage among Girls and Women in Bangladesh.” Global Environmental Change 65 (November). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378020307433?via%3Di
  • Donato, Katharine M. and Elizabeth Ferris. 2020. “Refugee Integration in Canada, Europe, and the United States: Perspectives from Research.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 690: 7-35. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002716220943169
  • League, Avery, Katharine M. Donato, Nima Sheth, Elizabeth Selden, Sheetal Patel, Laurie Ball Cooper and Emily Mendenhall. 2021. “A Systematic Review of Medical-Legal Partnerships Serving Immigrant Communities in the United States.” Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health (September 2020 on-line) 23(1): 163-174. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10903-020-01088-1
  • Donato, Katharine M., Laura Caron, and Erin R. Hamilton. 2020. “Migration and Mental Health in Mexico: Domestic Migrants, Returned U.S. Migrants, and Non-Migrants.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, February.https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00970
  • Best, Kelsea B., Jonathan M. Gilligan, Hiba Baroud, Amanda R. Carrico, Katharine M. Donato, Brooke A. Ackerly and Bishawjit Mallick. 2020. “Random Forest Analysis of Two Household Surveys can identify Important Predictors of Migration in Bangladesh.” Journal of Computational Social Science, March 11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-020-00066-9
  • Donato, Katharine M., Erin R. Hamilton, and Anthony Bernard-Sages. 2019. “Gender and Health in Mexico: Differences between Returned Migrants and Non-  Migrants.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 684(1): 165-187. (July). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0002716219857964
  • Carrico, Amanda and Katharine M. Donato. 2019. “Extreme Weather and Migration: Evidence from Bangladesh.” Population and Environment 41: 1-31. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11111-019-00322-9.
  • Singh, Lisa, Laila Wahedi, Yanchen Wang, Yifang Wei, Christo Kirov, Susan Martin, Katharine Donato, Yaguang Liu, and Kornraphop Kawintiranon. 2019. “Blending Noisy Social Media Signals with Traditional Movement Variables to Predict Forced Migration.” KDD’19: Proceeding of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (July): 1975-83 https://doi.org/10.1145/3292500.3330774.
  • Donato, Katharine M., Gabriela León-Pérez, Kenneth A. Wallston, and Sunil Kripalini.  2018. “Something Old, Something New:  When Gender Matters in the Relationship between Social Support and Health.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 59(3): 352-370. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022146518789362
  • Foner, Nancy, Kay Deaux, and Katharine M. Donato. 2018. “Introduction: Immigration and Changing Identities.” RSF Journal of the Social Sciences 4(5): 1-25. https://www.rsfjournal.org/doi/full/10.7758/RSF.2018.4.5.01
  • Tran, Van C. and Katharine M. Donato. 2018. “Provision of Healthcare Coverage to the U.S. Unauthorized Population:  Lessons Learned and Implications for Migrant Health in Urban China.” China Population and Development Studies (On-line June) https://rdcu.be/1TLf
  • DeWaard, Jack, Jenna Nobles, and Katharine M. Donato. 2018. “Migration and Parental Absence in Latin America: A Comparative Assessment of Transnational Families in Latin America.” Population, Space and Place, first published on-line. May 23. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/psp.2166
  • Donato, Katharine M. and Samantha Perez. 2017. “Crossing the Mexico-U.S. Border:  Illegality and Children’s Migration.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 3(4): 116-135. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/665564/pdf