Trainees and Post Docs
Trainees
(Organized by start year then alphabetically by last name)
Baishakhi Basu | |
| Baishakhi Basu is a second year international graduate student of biocultural anthropology and is an awardee of the Wadsworth fellowship. She is interested to pursue her research in the area of female reproductive ecology, more specifically, on the effect of nutrition on female reproductive aging. Baishakhi aims to carry out her field work on a naturally fertile population of south-east Asia. |
Kyle Frankiewich | |
| Kyle is currently earning concurrent degrees: a Master of Public Administration at the Evans School of Public Affairs, as well as a Master of Urban Planning at the College of the Built Environment. He is interested in energy and water policy, and hopes to understand how global warming and human migration patterns will impact demand for energy and infrastructure services, especially in urban environments. Kyle has yet to finalize a thesis topic, and would appreciate any advice or thoughts on potential questions that fall in his subject matter interest. |
Ji Young Kang | |
| Ji Young is a Ph.D student in the school of social work. Her broad research interests include poverty, inequality, health disparities and social policy. Specifically she wants to explore how poverty and inequality are intersected with health disparities and how social policies affect this interrelated poverty and health outcome. She is currently working with Jennifer Romich on a project of understanding the relationship between economic disconnection and child welfare outcome. Previously, Ji Young worked as a staff member for the National Assembly in Korea addressing social issues by analyzing outcomes of the safety net. She earned a master in social work at Yonsei University in Korea. |
Hui Mai | |
| Hui Mai is a PhD student in Economics. Her research interest focuses on women's fertility decision and how that would affect their wage growth over the career path. She is also interested in measuring the relative importance of various "credentials" for immigrants' job search in the labor market. |
Christina Miyawaki | |
| Christina is a second-year PhD student in the School of Social Work. Her research interests include racial and ethnic health disparities among older adults, and mental health and cultural issues among immigrant caregivers of older adults pertinent to migration. She worked under the supervision of CSDE affiliate, Dr. David Takeuchi and currently with Drs. Gunnar Almgren and Diane Morrison on a project assessing the effects of social isolation on mental and physical health of older Americans across race and ethnicity. Christina received her Master of Arts degree from San Francisco State University and Master of Social Welfare degree from the University of California, Berkeley both with a concentration in Gerontology. |
Tiffany Pan | |
| Tiffany is pursuing a PhD in Biocultural Anthropology and an MPH in Epidemiology. Her general research interests are disease ecology and evolutionary medicine. She is especially fascinated by the links between biology, behavior, and environment and their collective effects on human health. She plans to examine the emergence of novel human infections in the context of anthropogenic environmental changes and human-nonhuman animal interactions. The ultimate goal is to take a holistic approach to identifying risk factors for emerging diseases and preventing future epidemics. Tiffany earned a BS from Duke University, where she studied Biological Anthropology & Anatomy and Environmental Sciences. |
Athena Pantazis | |
| Athena is a graduate student in sociology. Her research focuses on fertility and mortality in Africa with particular interest in HIV and reproductive health. Prior to coming to the UW, she earned an MPH from Tulane University and worked in HIV research and programming in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea-Conakry. |
Mark Wheldon | |
| Mark is a PhD student in the Department of Statistics. He is a member of the BayesPop working group and is working on a new method of producing probabilistic estimates of fertility, mortality and migration rates from multiple, noisy data sources. The goal is to develop a method that works well for countries without well-funded statistical systems. Previously, he worked at the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand where he also got his MSc. Prior to that, he worked for Statistics New Zealand on projects related to regional and housing statistics. His interests include the development and application of new statistical methods in the social sciences, Bayesian statistics generally, MCMC methodology, elicitation of priors from experts and Bayesian methods for evidence synthesis. |
Hilary Bethancourt | |
| Hilary's broader interests are in the fields of medical anthropology
and international public health. Specifically, she is interested in
the nutritional and epidemiological transitions and the developmental,
environmental, cultural, behavioral, and socioeconomic correlates of
chronic and degenerative diseases. She conducted undergraduate
anthropological research in Bolivia on determinants of health care
decisions among Tsimane Amerindians, but she now plans to shift her
focus to trends in growth, development, and disease in China.
Ultimately, Hilary aims to develop a multidisciplinary approach to
understanding and confronting lifestyle-related illnesses.
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Britni Bethune |
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Eunice Blemahdoo |
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Ross Cantor | |
| Ross Cantor is a 2nd year graduate student in the department of sociology. His research interests include health, sexuality and HIV/AIDS. He recently co-authored a handbook chapter with Dr. Pepper Schwartz and a fellow graduate student titled "Couples and Sexuality." This chapter will appear in the forthcoming International Handbook on the Demography of Sexuality. Ross is working on his Masters and is examining condom use among middle-aged and older adults.
Prior to attending the University of Washington, Ross spent a year living in Adelaide, Australia taking courses at the University of Adelaide. He also was a research assistant to Dr. Bernice Pescosolido at the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research. In addition, he was the editorial assistant and press coordinator at the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Both of these professional appointments were held at Indiana University. |
Kristy Copeland | |
| Kristy is a first-year doctoral student in the Geography Department. Her research interests include causes, effects, and policy implications of spatial phenomena like concentrated poverty, inequality, segregation, immigration, and mobility. Specifically, she plans to apply spatial statistics to the study of migration and integration of human populations, especially ethnic groups. Prior to joining University of Washington, Kristy earned a Masters in Urban Spatial Analytics from University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Sociology and Public Policy from UCLA. |
Catherine Copeland | |
| Catherine is a first-year graduate student at the Evans School of Public Affairs. She is currently a Research Assistant at the Health Promotion Research Center (HPRC) through the School of Public Health. HPRC conducts community-based research with the goal of promoting the health and well-being of middle-aged and older adults and the center is funded by the CDC. Previously, she worked at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, nonprofit medical research organization started in 2003 by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen. She received B.S. in Biology and a B.A. in French from Santa Clara University. |
Brad Foster | |
| Brad is a graduate student in the sociology department. His research interests currently include social demography, rural and public sociology, poverty, stratification, and critical social theory. Seeking to find the intersection of several of these topics, Brad is beginning research on his master's thesis examining links between county-level social, institutional, and geographic structures and patterns of immigration and migration in the US. He counts himself fortunate to hold a position as a research assistant on the Community Vitality Project at the Evans School of Public Affairs, where he is researching the links between inadequate housing, inequality, and urban/rural geography in the face of the recent recession and foreclosure crisis. Before coming to the University of Washington, Brad graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College with a BA in Sociology and Religion/Philosophy and spent six months teaching English in Thailand on a Fulbright Fellowship. He sometimes misses the West Virginia hills. |
Chasya Hoagland | |
| Chasya Hoagland is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics. Her research interests are generally in
microeconomics, labor economics, and behavioral economics. She is generally interested in understanding how people respond to incentives and how best to craft incentives in contracts, legislation, and other policy to achieve optimal outcomes. She is most interested in empirical work, and hopes to eventually choose a career where she will help craft economically-grounded policy solutions. Chasya currently is working with the City of Everett, Washington on their hazard mitigation plan update, where she is identifying vulnerabilities in their economy as well as tools to help reduce the economic disruption caused by a natural disaster. |
Aditya Khanna | |
| I grew up in Bombay, India. After completing my degree in mathematics at Moravian College (Bethlehem, PA),
I taught high school math and physics for a year before moving to Seattle to begin studies in the
Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management Program at UW. Currently, my work focuses
on studying the intersection between biology and human behavior in terms of their impact
on HIV transmission. I am interested in stochastic network based models of HIV, the statistical
properties of these networks, and developing a richer framework for modeling infectious disease transmission. |
Junhong Kim | |
| Junhong Kim is a 5th year graduate student in the department of anthropology. His research interest includes large scale cooperation by cultural group selection, evolutionary approaches to culture and gene-culture coevolution. He is working on his dissertation project, “Cultural Evolutionary Process of Human Cooperation on a city-wide scale.” His dissertation project will involve surveys, experimental games, social network analysis and ethnographic observation of group-beneficial activities. Before attending UW, he graduated from Seoul National University in 2006 with a Master’s degree in Anthropology. |
Robin LaSota | |
| Robin is a CREST Fellow (Collaborative Researchers for Education Sciences Training) and PhD student in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the UW College of Education. Robin’s research aims are to study individual, institutional, and environmental factors that effectively support students from diverse cultural, social, and economic backgrounds to succeed in the educational system, with a focus on baccalaureate degree attainment. While studying factors that increase college enrollment, completion, and academic performance, she also examines programs that foster interdisciplinary scholarship and problem-solving. The advancement of longitudinal educational data systems that facilitate better transitions from early childhood through postsecondary education, and improved educational policy design is a strong interest. Throughout her career, Robin served as an education program designer, evaluation researcher (integrating qualitative and quantitative data analysis and inquiry), grant proposal writer, and educational professional development specialist. Robin received her master’s degree in Educational Policy and Evaluation from Stanford University, and a bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies and Government from Oberlin College. |
Tavis Linsin | |
| Tavis Linsin is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington College of Education. Tavis’ research focuses on education inequality and supporting the learning and self-expression of low-income and otherwise marginalized students. His current research examines learning in music and the arts. Tavis earned his Master’s degree in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and his Bachelor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music. Before coming to the University of Washington, Tavis conducted education research in India, Costa Rica, as well as the U.S. He is currently a Research Assistant at the Center for Multicultural Education at the UW College of Education. |
Shane Murphy | |
| Shane is a graduate student in the department of Economics and a research assistant at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation with professors Dean Jamison and Christopher J.L. Murray. His fields of interest are primarily health economics, public economics, political economy, and economic development. He is currently working on projects involving health and sanitation in India, risk adjustment in hospital cost functions, criminal states, and human capital and health and mortality. Shane has a master’s degree in mathematics from Iowa State University. |
Gregor Passolt | |
| Gregor is working on adapting the vitality-based mortality models to study HIV and treatment in Sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, he is analyzing the efficacy of treatment by age-group and the possibility of varying ART initiation times. A second-year student in the Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management (QERM) program, Gregor's broader research interests have to do with development and the effective use of international aid. After graduating from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in math, he spent two years teaching math and physics in Tanzania with the Peace Corps.
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Tim Thomas | |
| Tim received his BA in sociology from UW in 2008. His senior thesis, under the supervision of CSDE affiliate Stewart Tolnay, used GIS and spatial analysis of census data from 1980 to 2000 to compare socio-economic variables of residents surrounding Seattle’s MLK Way to rest of the city. He will be starting graduate school this fall in Sociology, where he looks forward to exploring his research interests in spatial demography with a focus on class and racial inequality.
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Bonnie Beeson | |
| Bonnie is a first-year graduate student in the Sociology Department. Her research interests include: stratification, family and gender, and immigration, with a particular emphasis on child welfare. She is interested in the ways children are stratified, measures of subjective well-being, and a mixed-methods approach. Prior to coming the University of Washington, Bonnie spent a year in France teaching English to primary students, and a year working with children with autism and other developmental delays. |
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell | |
| Benjamin’s topical interests range broadly from migration and remittance behaviors in the Caribbean to the rise and fall of ancient Maya polities. His theoretical focus lies at the intersection of social theory and evolutionary biology. His methodological emphases are analytical and simulation modeling of demographic and evolutionary processes, and mixing quantitative with qualitative methods in empirical research. His current collaborative projects include: a study of how biology, culture and history together shape migration and remittance behavior in rural Dominica (collaborators: Eric Smith, UW Anthropology, CSDE, Donna Leonetti, UW Anthropology, CSDE, Robert Quinlan, WSU Anthropology); developing agent-based and analytical models of emergent social inequality in small scale societies (collaborators: Eric Smith, UW Anthropology, CSDE, Lynette Shaw, UW Sociology); and an application of economic bargaining theory to the geographic distribution of ancient Maya polity emergence and collapse (collaborator: Lisa Lucero, Urbana-Champaign Archaeology). His pursuits are bereft without the support, inspiration, and love of his wife Malyse and daughter Alice. Along with CSDE Associate Director Sara Curran, he endeavors to assemble a CSDE training group that concentrates on migrant remittance studies. |
Mandy Ching | |
| Mandy’s main interests currently involve the intersection of parental investment, socioeconomic status and the Demographic Transition. More broadly, she is interested in human behavioral ecology and human reproductive ecology. Her current research project examines the effects of socioeconomic status and the sex of one’s children in determining total family size in the United States using data from the NLSY79. |
Jennifer Chunn |
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Tara Hayes Constant | |
| Tara is a first-year graduate student in Anthropology. Her research interests include migration, stress, chronic disease, biomarkers and evolutionary medicine, especially as applied to public and global health. She plans to use the tools of anthropology, demography and epidemiology to address issues of health inequality and generate a better understanding of the social determinants of those imbalances. Before coming to the UW Tara worked as a journalist, with a writing emphasis on women’s health. |
Joseph Dieleman | |
| Joe is a second year graduate student in Economics of University of Washington. His primary academic interests are both the micro and macro issues surrounding development and transition economies. More specifically related to CSDE he is interested in determinants of immigration, demographics associated with development and growth, the spatial components related population economics, and labor markets within transition economies. Prior to being in Seattle, Joe worked and lived in Michigan and Honduras. |
Karen Tabb Dina | |
| Karen Tabb Dina is a PhD student in School of Social Work. Her research interests include racial and ethnic health disparities and mental health outcomes. Currently she is working with Drs. Amelia Gavin and Jennifer Melville on a longitudinal project to assess the prevalence of major depression, anxiety disorder, and suicide ideation during the perinatal period, as well as determine the role of these mental health conditions in adverse birth outcomes. Prior to beginning the program at the University of Washington she was the Community Research Coordinator for the Case Western Reserve Center for Reducing Health Disparities. She received her Masters degree in Social Work from The University of Michigan with a concentration in Social Policy and Evaluation. |
Chien-Hao Fu | |
| Chien-Hao is a PhD student in Economics. He has broad interests in socioeconomic issues with the focus on individual’s microeconomic behaviors. Prior to enrolling in the PhD program, he received his Master’s in 2008 from UW’s Evans School of Public Affairs with the concentration on education and social policy. He is currently working on applying his knowledge on labor and educational issues and is a teaching assistant for the Department of Economics. |
Amanda Guyton | |
| Amanda is a PhD student in biocultural anthropology. She is interested in the ways in which migration affects health both within and between generations. Her interests also include fetal/developmental origins of disease, human reproductive endocrinology and a mixed methods approach. |
Mary King | |
| Mary is a first-year graduate student in biocultural anthropology. Her research interests include human behavioral ecology and economic anthropology. Previously, she worked on a project reconstructing life histories of 19th century migrants to the American frontier. In the future, she is interested in continuing to look at aspects of socioeconomic mobility and fertility in migrants. Historical studies provide a unique opportunity to reconstruct demographic patterns over multiple generations within an evolutionary and ecological framework. |
Daeyong Lee | |
| My name is Daeyong and I’m a 2nd yr Ph.D student in Economics at the University of Washington. I’m interested in immigration and welfare states. I focus on costs and benefits of welfare, both among immigrants and natives. I also assess net impacts of the trends in immigrant welfare recipiency. |
ManChui Leung | |
| ManChui’s research interests include how immigrant social networks, place, and gender impact health outcomes. She is currently working on a Place, Health and Equity book project with Dr. David Takeuchi and other interdisciplinary scholars across the U.S. Her focus on medical sociology, health disparities and demography stems from her experience in community health service and immigrant organizing in Canada, U.S. and the Pacific. She is a 2009-2010 American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship Program Fellow and a 2010-2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. |
Yuta Masuda | |
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Yuta is a second year PhD student at the Daniel J. Evans School of
Public Affairs. His primary interests are in time use research, and how
time use data can be utilized to provide richer analysis on health and
environmental outcomes. Specifically, he is interested in how individual
changes in behavior affect health and environmental outcomes. His
broader interests include public and global health policy, international
development policy, program evaluation, and quantitative methods. Prior
to being in Seattle, Yuta was an NGO development volunteer in the
Republic of Georgia, and also worked as a health economics research
associate at RTI International. |
Jacqueline Meijer-Irons | |
| I am a third year doctoral student in Public Policy and Management at the Evans School of Public Affairs. My current research interests lie at the intersection of migration, institutions and the environment. Broadly speaking, I am interested in understanding how various institutional settings influence migrant decision-making in the face of climate change predictions. I am working as a Research Assistant at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, participating in several qualitative research projects. Prior to enrolling in the PhD program I earned an MPA from the Evans School and a BA in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley. I live in South Seattle with my husband and two children. |
Arnisson Andre Ortega | |
| I am a Ph.D. student currently on my third year in the Geography program. My current academic interests transcend three themes: migration, urbanization and housing. I received my master’s degree in Demography at the University of the Philippines Population Institute where I did my thesis on migration and solid waste in Metro Manila. For my dissertation project, I am using a political-economic lens in interrogating the real estate industry in the Philippines and ties it to issues on migration, urbanization and neoliberalism. Focusing on the emergence of gated villages and residential subdivisions in transitional agrarian communities surrounding Metropolitan Manila, I ‘situate’ these property developments by interrogating their grounded development and embedded linkages with the cultural politics of everyday life inside and outside the gates. I am particularly fond of using a mixed methods approach that tie in archival work, spatial ethnography, participant group work, and spatial statistics. |
Deleena Patton |
Deleena is a first-year graduate student in Sociology. Her research interests include the family, education, and stratification. In particular, she is interested in the importance of parents and parental expectations in early school success. Before coming to the UW, Deleena worked as an elementary school teacher in Oakland, California through Teach for America. |
Jacob Reidhead | |
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Tim Scharks | |
| Tim is a second-year Ph.D. student in Public Policy and Management at the Evans School of Public Affairs. His research interests are in environmental policy, risk perception, and risk communication. He hopes to use demographic methods to design and test environmental health communications for heterogeneous populations. |
Yu-hsuan Su | |
| Yu-hsuan is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics. Her research interests focus on economic issues in developing countries, including poverty, labor, population, labor, population, trade, financial institutions and in particular, microfinance. Before coming to the University of Washington, Yu-hsuan worked for the Taiwan Financial Supervisory Commission, the financial regulatory body of Taiwan, and completed her MA in International and Development Economics at Yale University. During her time at Yale, she also visited Shanghai and Beijing, China to work on a Chinese economic development project as a research assistant. |
Jason Williams | |
| I am a PhD student in the Evans School of Public Affairs, attempting to concentrate in both statistics and demography. My background is in clinical psychology, where I became interested in measurement issues (psychometrics) and research methods in general. My master's thesis, for example, developed and conducted preliminary psychometric validation of a metric measurement of self-harm behavior. I have done research in child welfare and other social services. My interests are broad, including measurement issues, the potential of indicators and administrative data, nutrition and food policy, and poverty. I'm looking to investigate the intersection among food and nutrition policy, recent developments in food markets (localvores, CSAs, organics, etc.), information issues, and access to healthy food. I am furthermore interested in neighborhood determinants of social and health outcomes. Meanwhile, I am working on papers examining factors associated with disruption of foster care placements and how macropolitical attention to social issues may be distorted by the occurrence of dramatic focusing events.
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Elizabeth Ackert | |
| Liz’s research interests focus on the intersection of immigration and social stratification. Before beginning her graduate study at the University of Washington, she completed a Master’s degree in Iberian and Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her Master’s thesis examined the evolution of immigrant education policy in Spain, a relatively new country of immigration. Currently, she is working towards a Master’s thesis in Sociology. Her current research examines the implications of the recent geographic diversification of immigrant settlement in the United States for the study of immigrant incorporation. Specifically, she hopes to identify how the process of immigrant incorporation in “new destinations” of immigrant settlement in the U.S. converges or diverges with processes of immigrant incorporation in traditional communities of settlement. |
Mike Babb | |
| Mr. Babb is currently a second year graduate student in geography whose main
interests are populations, economics, and geographic information systems; in
particular, demography and segregation. His current work focuses on the
spatial distribution of populations, how populations are measured, and
imputation rates of demographic data in the US census. This research is
using 2000 US census data at multiple scales to look at census non-response
and the ramifications of non-response. Additionally, he is working on a
project examining historical income inequality in the Pacific Northwest. Mr.
Babb has also served in a professional capacity at several Seattle based
consulting firms, most recently at Community Attributes, and provided
contract support to Microsoft on the Virtual Earth project. |
Sabrina Bonaparte | |
| Sabrina’s research interests include fertility and contraceptive use, educational attainment, and urbanization and migration in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. Her Master’s thesis examines the effects of modernization on the determinants of contraceptive use in Indonesia from 1976-1993, using the Indonesian Family Life Survey and the Indonesian Fertility Survey (from the WFS). Specifically, she tests whether factors related to modernization, such as female educational composition, explain the increase in the contraceptive use rates over the 20-year time period, and finds that these factors only explain a fraction of the percentage. Other societal factors, and Indonesia’s family planning program, in particular, is the primary reason for the rapid rise in contraceptive use. |
Jennifer Laird | |
| Jenn is a first-year graduate student in Sociology. Her research interests include demography and stratification. She is currently working with Jake Rosenfeld on a project that examines the relationship between inequality and voter behavior. Jenn is also working with Stew Tolnay on research related to the Great Migration and lynching in the American South. Before coming to UW, Jenn was the Associate Director of the NSF ADVANCE program for women scientists at Columbia University. |
Katrina Leupp | |
| Katrina's research interests include the family, stratification, gender roles, and poverty. She is particularly interested in how households manage the competing demands of employment and family care. Her MA thesis examines the impact of family finances, identity, and cultural ideas about mothering on women's return to employment after childbirth.
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Kerry MacQuarrie | |
| Kerry's research interests include fertility, family demography, gender and
reproductive health in low-income countries. She is particularly interested
in developing and applying mixed methods and life course approaches to the
study of transitions to adulthood, early marriage and childbearing,
household and community influences on contraceptive and abortion
decision-making, HIV stigma, and male participation in reproductive health.
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Cara Margherio | |
| Cara’s research interests include fertility, reproductive healthcare, methods and feminist theory. Her current project analyzes statistical definitions of stalling fertility declines. Specifically, she examines the relationship between fertility and HIV/AIDS in rural Agincourt, South Africa. She is also interested in applying feminist postcolonial theory to a critique of demographic methodology. |
Greg Matthews | |
| My research interests include morbidity and mortality, social inequality, public health, global health, and methods. My master's thesis studies the implications of the prison expansion for race inequalities in health in the United States, focusing on HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. I am currently working on projects with Sam Clark and Adrian Raftery that include modeling mortality and AIDS in developing countries with data from demographic surveillance sites, and probabilistic projections of populations using the Bayesian melding approach. Before entering graduate school I worked at Child Trends in Washington, DC, with projects on fatherhood, marriage, evaluations of afterschool and early childhood programs, and survey design. I recently conducted a brief analysis of inequalities in access to health care and health outcomes across demographic groups of children in Washington state using National Survey of Children's Health data. |
Jongjit Rittirong | |
| My research interests are the elderly, health care services, longitudinal study, and research methodology, especially spatial analysis. Before studying at the University of Washington, I worked for the Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University in Thailand. I developed a database system for a longitudinal project, Kanchanaburi Demographic Surveillance System (KDSS). Using the KDSS dataset for my Master thesis, I focused on the elderly and examined geographical factors and their effects on the rate of health care accessibility. The effects were compared between urban and rural areas in order to locate the area needing supplemental health care services. |
David Sharrow | |
| Dave's interests include ecology, stratification, residential segregation and inequality in health and mortality. His previous research includes a study of the spatial location of banks and payday lenders in King County, Washington. He currently works with Sam Clark and Adrian Raftery in the probabilistic population projection group using parametric methods to model HIV/AIDS-related mortality in Africa.
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Amy Spring | |
| Amy’s research interests include community and urban sociology, social inequality, poverty, and spatial analysis using Geographic Information Systems. Her master’s thesis studies the relationships between family type, residential segregation, and living in disadvantaged neighborhoods for families in Seattle and the surrounding urban area. Additionally, she works on the Community Vitality Project with Rachel Kleit, exploring key ways to reduce poverty in communities that vary by urban-rural location, in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, and with regard to the local economic environment. |
Emi Tamaki | |
| Emi's research interests include immigration, fertility, social
change, comparative sociology, and research methodology. Her current
project explores the effect of globalization on movements of people.
Specifically, she examines the determinants and consequences of
immigrants' continued ties with their countries of origin. She also
compares the different mechanisms of home country engagement among
Latino and Asian Americans.
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Matthew Townley | |
| Matt’s research interests generally concern how slow, sea changes in population composition are intertwined with cultural and economic outcomes. Before coming to the University of Washington, Matt finished an MS in Geography at Texas State University in which he examined the cultural construction of health and fitness as a process of subject formation among very low fertility populations. His current interests continue with the theme of very low fertility populations and how they normatively construct the ideals of urban life in post-transition societies.
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Ben Trumble | |
| Ben is a third year graduate student in Biocultural Anthropology. He is interested in using interdisciplinary biodemograpic approaches to study men’s health; combining aspects of reproductive endocrinology and human behavioral ecology. His research focuses on the relationship between testosterone and immune function, and the implications this has for male life histories. He is currently developing a population level testosterone assay designed to withstand rigorous field conditions. His other research interests include risk taking behavior, costly signaling, variations in sex-ratio at
birth, and the development of population level biomarker tests. |
Eric Waithaka | |
| Eric’s scholarly interest broadly stated revolves around young adults’ transition into adulthood both in the U.S. in and Sub-Saharan African. He is interested in the ways in which young adults (18-34 years) go about building a variety of assets (including wealth). Specifically, his research focuses on how structural factors and individual human agency shapes life transitions for many young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds. His current research projects include: an examination of the mechanisms through which young adults desist or persist in their substance use and crime involvement. He is also conducting exploratory research on how young adults’ housing and living situations influence their thoughts and actions about their “possible future” in issues such as obtaining an education, working, operating a business and owing a home. |
Elise Bowditch | |
| Elise Bowditch is a PhD candidate. She is currently working as a Research Assistant for the Department of Geography, the University of Washington. For more information, please see her CV . DEPT : Geography EMAIL : click here SPONSOR : NICHD START YEAR : 2006-07 |
Suzanne Eichenlaub | |
| As a sociology graduate student, my major area of study is demography. My research interests include race and ethnicity, stratification, inequality and health disparities. My master's thesis explores the relationship between income inequality and health. Additionally, I work with Stewart Tolnay on a project that investigates the migration of African-Americans to the western United States. |
Jennifer Aranda | |
| As a graduate student in Biocultural Anthropology, I am focusing on the evolution and variation of life history stages in human and nonhuman primates. Specifically, I am interested in the timing of puberty and adolescence, variation in the timing and velocity of the adolescent growth spurt and the timing of the onset of menarche in the primate lineage, as well as the ecological and cultural factors that contribute to this variation. |
Jerusha Achterberg | |
| Jerusha Achterberg received her Masters in 2006 after her research project on the "Distribution and spread of tuberculosis within a generalized population." She is currently working at the University of Washington as a Teaching Assistant for the Department of Anthropology. DEPT : Anthropology EMAIL : click here WEB : http://staff.washington.edu/jerusha/ SPONSOR : NICHD START YEAR : 2003-04 |
Lynne Taguchi | |
| Lynne Taguchi received her Masters in 2003. Her thesis was "The Effects of Education and Communist Party Membership on Income in a Transitioning Economy: The Case of Viet Nam." Lynne is now a Research Assistant at CSDE. DEPT : Sociology OFFICE : 412 Savery EMAIL : click here SPONSOR : NICHD START YEAR : 2002-03 |
Postdocs
Miruna Petrescu-Prahova | |
| My research interests include ethnicity and migration, organizations, social networks, and gender inequality. I completed a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine. In my dissertation I analyzed the manner in which the spatial distribution of ethnic groups within modern cities emerges from the interaction of elements such as physical characteristics of the urban environment, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, and preferences for neighborhood composition. In my current position as a post-doctoral research associate in the Department of Statistics I examine the processes that underlie the formation of emergent multiorganizational networks during disaster response. For more information please see Miruna's CVDEPT : Statistics EMAIL : click here |
Natasha Rivers | |
| Natasha Rivers recently completed a one year post-doc appointment with the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota. She received her PhD in the department of Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles. She examines contemporary sub-Saharan African migration to and within the U.S. She focuses on motivations for migration, settlement, socio-economic integration, identity, housing, and assimilation. Natasha is now a post-doc with the CSDE working on a collaborative research project with Mark Ellis and Richard Wright. |
