Welcome to the New Year! We’re looking forward to a winter quarter filled with excellent speakers and population research presentations. Click here for a link to the pdf of our poster (or, if you’re on campus, please send an email to csde@uw.edu, if you want a hardcopy).

We’ll be launching the quarter’s speakers series with a talk by Professor Hilary Schwandt (Western Washington University) who will be reporting results from a six year study of a Rwandan family planning program. In the next week (1/17/24), we shift our focus to migration and a presentation by Professors Irene Bloemraad (University of British Columbia) and Jenny Van Hook (Pennsylvania State University).  On January 24, Dr. Mark Henderson (Northeastern University) will discuss his recent, historical research about regional variation in famine outcomes during China’s Great Leap Forward.  Professor Patrick Greiner (Sociology, University of Washington) will present population research on energy consumption patterns as indicative of a convergence around behavioral and technical change on January 31.  We’ll host a panel presentation on demographic responses to California wildfires by a team of interdisciplinary scholars - Professor Sameer Shah (SEFS, UW), Professor Ethan Sharygin (Portland State University), Dr. Mary Angelica Painter (University of Colorado) - on February 7.  For the rest of the quarter, CSDE’s seminars will focus on a population health questions in a number of domains.  First, on February 14, Professor Amy Bailey (University of Illinois, Chicago) will present her research on “History as a Fundamental Cause of Disease.”  Then, on February 21, we’ll host Professor Brea Perry (Indiana University) during her presentation on “Aging and the Social Brain” which examines the role of social networks in Alzheimer’s disease progression. On February 28, Professor Sasha Johfre (Sociology, UW) will present on “Conceptualizing Age, Predicting Inequality.”  And, then on March 7, Professor Jason Kerwin (Economics, UW) and Divya Pandey (University of Minnesota) will present on “Navigating Ambiguity: Imprecise of Probabilities and Updating of Disease Risk Beliefs.”  We’ll close out the quarter speaker series with lightning talks and poster presentations by CSDE Trainees on March 14. Refreshments provided!

In a study just released in Natural Hazards and Earth Systems Sciences, CSDE Affiliate Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen (Urban Planning and Design, Environmental and Occupational Health) and colleagues present a novel analysis of the theorized relationship between migration and fatalities during major earthquakes. The paper, lead-authored by Chen, highlights the role of migration in vulnerability to natural hazards and provides an innovative geospatial method to capture migration flows from tribal areas and low-income neighborhoods.

Since the year 2000, individuals have been allowed to report more than one race on the decennial census. While racial and ethnic identification among those with multiple identities can vary over time and across contexts, studies of changes in racial and ethnic identification have been limited by data availability. To examine this issue, CSDE External Affiliate Matthew Hall (Cornell University) and Jiwon Lee (Cornell University) received funding from RSF which will allow them to analyze the development of racial and ethnic identities among multiracial Americans from infancy to young adulthood.

The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) and Arnold Ventures recently announced a collaborative call for causal research on the criminal justice system. Criminal justice policies and practices include the work of the police, courts, jails, prisons, probation and parole, and immigration detention. Proposals must include causal research designs that can reliably isolate the treatment effects of a policy, practice, or intervention such as difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, and randomized controlled trials.

The UW Latino Center for Health recently announced their Small Grant Program, a $25,000 grant to fund research focused on Latinx health in Washington state. Applicants should include a partnership between a UW faculty investigator and a community-based organization that serves Latinx individuals, families, or communities.

Each grant award is up to $25,000 and does not include indirect costs. The deadline for submission is February 10, 2025. Funds will be awarded in May 2025 for up to a one-year project with a community partner.

Each quarter, CSDE offers 3-5 workshops on data sources, statistical and biomarker methodology, introductions to analysis programs, and more, all given by CSDE staff and faculty affiliates. These workshops can include hands-on training in novel methods and programming, lectures on innovative data sources, and discussions of important issues in research and data collection. Over the course of the academic year, CSDE will offer a diverse and exciting set of workshops, some of which will be offered in person and others remotely via Zoom. Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome to register for our workshops and we welcome registrants from outside the University of Washington for our remote workshops as well.

You can find our workshop website and register for our Winter 2025 workshops here. We will be filling in our schedule for Spring workshops soon, so stay tuned!

Please reach out to CSDE’s Training Director, Jessica Godwin (jlg0003@uw.edu), if you have additional workshops you would like to see offered in the future and we will do our best to accommodate those requests.

The Population Council recently announced the December 2024 issue of Studies in Family Planning, a leading peer-reviewed journal publishing public health, social science, and biomedical research from around the world. This issue includes a wide range of articles covering diverse topics from sterilization to contraception and more. Read the new issue here.

The most recent issue of Population and Development Review is now published and is dedicated to “Contraceptive Transitions: Explanations and Evidence.” Access the full set of new articles here.

Secure your hotel reservation now for the Population Association of America (PAA) Conference from April 10-13, 2025 at the Washington, DC Marriott Marquis. Use the special links on the Hotel and Travel page to book at the discounted PAA rate. Registration will open soon!

CSDE Trainees are encouraged to select one of these courses as a Demographic Methods Certificate elective. CSDE Affiliates, please share these courses with your students:

CSDE Core Courses Winter 2025

SOC/CSSS/CSDE 533: Research Methods in Demography (3 or 5 credits)

• Instructor: Jessica Godwin
• Note: 5 credit version (B sections) includes an R lab and is required for completion of the Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods

Recommended Electives Winter 2025

STAT/CSSS/SOC 534: Statistical Methods for Spatial Data (3 credits)

• Instructor: Jon Wakefield 

EPI 548/HSERV 548: Research Methods for Social and Contextual Determinants of Health (3 credits)

• Instructor: Anjum Hajat

G H/HSERV 544: Maternal and Child Health in Low and Middle Income Countries (3 credits)

• Instructor: Donna Denno

EPI 521/HSERV 542: Epidemiology of Maternal and Child Health Problems (3 credits)

• Instructor: Daniel Enquobahrie

BIOST/EPI 537: Survival Data Analysis in Epidemiology (4 credits)

• Instructor: Ting Ye

EPI 550/G H 552: Understanding Pandemics: When People, Pathogens, and a Changing Planet Collide (3 credits)

• Instructor: Julianne Meisner

If you have any questions regarding these courses or the CSDE Certificate Program, please reach out to CSDE Certificate Program Advisor, Jill Fulmore (fulmore@uw.edu). You can view the CSDE Certificate Program details here.

The University of Washington eScience Institute is partnering with Microsoft on the new UW Azure GenAI for Science Hub. Through this Hub we are offering cloud computing credits to UW researchers (faculty, postdocs, research staff) from all 3 UW campuses for projects where utilization of generative AI is central to accomplishing their research goals. Grants of up to $15,000 in Azure credits will enable access to AI Studio, Azure OpenAI Services, and GPUs as well as other standard Azure services.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Food Insight Group, and Chef Ann Foundation recently announced a Request for Research Proposals entitled “Understanding the School Food Workforce Subgrants.” The group is looking for research projects that will increase understanding of the current state of the K-12 school food workforce in the United States and/or explore strategies to create a stable and respected workforce that can provide healthy meals to students while supporting resilient local and regional food systems.

We invite early career faculty affiliates to join our new mailing list, csde_earlycareer.  Among other things, this is the way to find out info about our quarterly Early Career Affiliate happy hours, and you won’t want to miss those! These will be a great way to meet up with other junior scholars in a fun and casual atmosphere over snacks and drinks. Who counts as early career, you ask? Typically we mean folks who are pre-promotion (i.e. assistant professor or equivalent), but we're not strict! Join the list here (Please note - this is for faculty only - we are strict about that. Sorry, all others!)

The Team Science Workshop is a free, interactive training intended for interdisciplinary research teams working on a translational research project/study or within a research center. Teams will learn the theory and practice of team science. This workshop will be offered virtually during four 2-hour sessions on Wednesdays and Thursdays over a 2-week period. Each day, we will focus the first 90 minutes on team science education and training, and the final 30 minutes on team working sessions.

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is inviting applications from qualified and highly-motivated students for a Summer Research Visit. The goal of the Population and Social Data Science Summer Incubator Program is to enable discovery by bringing together data scientists and population scientists to work on focused, intensive and collaborative projects of broad societal relevance.

For a period of 3 months (June 2^nd – August 22^nd, 2025) participating students will work in small teams, with support from experienced mentors, towards a common research goal. For the summer of 2025, the focus of the program will be on three main research areas:

1)    “Climate Change and Mobility” mentored by Risto Conte Keivabu, Ebru Sanlitürk, and Monica Alexander (University of Toronto);

2)    “Machine Learning for Life Course Trajectories” mentored by Linda Vecgaile, Bruno Arpino (University of Padova) and Emilio Zagheni;

3)    “Mortality in War Settings” mentored by Yvette Young, Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Enrique Acosta (Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics -CED) and Irena Chen.

Learn more about this opportunity here. Applications are due by January 8th, 2025.

The Population Health Initiative recently announced the availability of Tier 2 Pilot Grants. The purpose of this tier of grants is to support faculty and PI-eligible staff to develop preliminary data or proof-of-concept needed to pursue follow-on funding to scale one’s efforts. Awards of up to $65,000 each will be available to interdisciplinary research teams. Letters of intent are due January 13, 2025. Learn more about the opportunity and previously funded projects here.

Applications for the Office of Global Affairs’ Global Innovation Fund are now open. This grant opportunity is intended to develop cross-college and cross-continent research collaborations, with award opportunities from $3,000 to $20,000 available to support fellowships, research projects, study abroad/away and teaching. Learn more about the various opportunities here. Applications are due January 31, 2025.

Abstract submissions are now open for the 2025 Data-Intensive Research Conference. The 2025 conference theme is Understanding Health and Population Dynamics through Big Microdata. We seek submissions that use full count census data to examine health and population dynamics. We are particularly interested in projects that link persons, families, or communities across censuses or link full count data to other sources, including the creation of place-based measures or person-level linkages to external data.

Empirical evidence shows that many migrants who are seemingly well “integrated” actually do not feel at home, report more discrimination and experience a weaker sense of belonging to their residence country than seemingly less integrated migrants. The literature on the integration paradox (IP) has expanded significantly in recent years, but it still falls short on longitudinal perspectives and empirical evidence on the underlying mechanisms and scope of countries and migrant groups studied. The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) recently announced a research workshop at Utrecht University (Netherlands) on this subject.

Call for papers: Gender & Society Special Issue — Feminist Metascience, Feminist Open Science? Pain Points and Possibilities, due by Feb 1st, 2025.

Guest Editors: Christin L. Munsch (University of Connecticut) and Daisy Verduzco Reyes (UC-Merced)

This special issue explores the relationship between feminism, metascience, and open science, seemingly disparate areas of inquiry of contemporary significance. This special issue will be a forum for feminist scholars to explore these relationships.

The NSF’s Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program reissued its call for proposals.  The call invites senior research proposals, early career development proposals, research coordination network proposals, conference and research community development activities, research experiences for undergraduates and graduates, and transdisciplinary research in environmental social science. The objective of the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences program is to support basic scientific research about the nature, causes, consequences, or evolution of the spatial dimensions of human behaviors and activities.

The Dissertation Research Grants program supports innovative and high-quality dissertation research that addresses questions relevant to any of RSF’s priority areas: Behavioral Science and Decision Making in Context; Future of Work; Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration; Immigration and Immigrant Integration; and Social, Political, and Economic Inequality. Proposed projects must be closely aligned with the funding priorities listed on the RSF website, contribute to RSF's mission to improve social and living conditions in the U.S., and demonstrate appropriate use of relevant theory, innovative data, rigorous research methods, and measures. Applicants must be enrolled doctoral students at institutions of higher education in the U.S. or a U.S. territory, who have completed all program requirements except the dissertation. Some grants will be co-funded with The Policy Academies and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. The proposal deadline is February 4, 2025, for funding starting in September 2025. Learn more about the Dissertation Research Grants program here.

RSF staff will discuss the Dissertation Research Grants application process at a webinar on January 7, 2025, at 2PM ET. Register for the webinar here.

With a seemingly endless range of possible models to analyze longitudinal data, how do you select the best one? This seminar from Statistical Horizons (taught by Kenneth A. Bollen) will address that question, providing you with practical tools to evaluate and select the most suitable longitudinal model. Learn more and access sample course materials here.

The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) will accept letters of inquiry under the core programs for Behavioral Science and Decision Making in Context and Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration. The foundation will also accept LOIs for the special initiatives Immigration and Immigrant Integration and Promoting Educational Attainment and Economic Mobility among Racially, Ethnically, and Economically Diverse Groups after the 2023 Supreme Court Decision to Ban Race-Conscious Admissions at Colleges and Universities.

Statistics indicate that as of 2024, nearly eight percent of the U.S. population identifies as LGBT, with much of this growth attributed to increases in LGBT identification among younger generations. In recent years, policies and laws have been enacted in support of LGBTQI+ communities and their well-being. For example, the 21st Century Cures Act included provisions for the NIH Director to encourage efforts to improve research related to the health of sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations, including to increase participation of SGM populations in NIH-supported clinical research and to facilitate the development of methods for conducting SGM research. SGM people were designated as a population with health disparities for NIH research in 2016 by the Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities in consultation with the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The NIH SGM health research portfolio has steadily grown and diversified since 2015.

However, members of SGM communities still face unique and significant disparities and barriers across domains such as physical, mental, and behavioral health; social and structural determinants of health; and healthcare access and quality. This includes higher SGM group-specific rates of and risks for some chronic health conditions (e.g., arthritis, asthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, certain forms of cancer, and HIV/AIDS), depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, smoking, stigma, discrimination, bullying, using preventive health services less frequently, and negative experiences in healthcare settings.

Population Research Planning Grants (PRPGs) are designed to provide in-kind support and/or funds of up to $25k* to support a wide array of activity types throughout the development of a research project. As part of our mission to complement rather than duplicate other campus opportunities such as the Population Health Initiative seed grants, we will consider funding things activities such as the use of CSDE services beyond the standard allotments for affiliates.

CSDE Matching Support includes in-kind or monetary support to accompany a submission to other on-campus funding mechanism, such as PHI, EarthLab, or Urban@UW. All projects must have a CSDE affiliate who is UW faculty and is listed as a PI or co-PI, with any number of other collaborators. Note that we require (PRPGs) or strongly suggest (matching funds) contacting either Development Core Director (Steven Goodreau) or CSDE Director (Sara Curran) to discuss possibilities for your specific proposal before submission.

The IPUMS Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) recently announced a new data release. IPUMS now includes 2022 data released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) earlier this year. This initial release updates over 1,100 variables from the Full Year Consolidated, Condition, Event, Prescribed Medicine, Appendix to the Event, and Pooled Variance files and adds variables about Long COVID. Learn more here.

As of 5/20/2024, NSF proposals that may impact the resources or interests of a federally recognized Tribal Nation will not be awarded by NSF without prior written approval from the official(s) designated by the relevant Tribal Nation(s).

Proposers must:

• Seek guidance from the potentially impacted Tribal Nation on activities that require review and prior approval from that Tribal Nation’s authorized designee.
• Submit a written request to the relevant Tribal Nation (based on their guidance), for approval to carry out the proposed activity that requires their review and approval.
• Complete the checkbox for “Potential Impacts on Tribal Nations” on the Cover Sheet. Note, lead organizations are responsible for this on collaborative proposals & proposals with subawards considered a single unified project.
• Upload one of the following into "Other supplementary documents" of Research.gov:
  • a copy of the written request to the relevant Tribal Nation to carry out any proposed activity/activities that may require prior approval from them
  • written confirmation from the Tribal Nation(s) that review and approval is not required
  • a copy of relevant Tribal Nation approval

This notice provides the research and research training community an overview of application and peer review changes impacting grant applications submitted for due dates on or after January 25, 2025, including:

• Simplified Review Framework for Most Research Project Grant Applications
• Revisions to the NIH Fellowship Application and Review Process
• Updates to Reference Letter Guidance
• Updates to NRSA Training Grant Applications
• Updated Application Forms (FORMS-I)
• Common Forms for Biographical Sketch and Current and Pending (Other) Support