We look forward to welcoming Jake Watson from the University of California San Diego on Friday, March 13th, in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. Follow this link to sign up for a 1:1 meeting with Dr. Watson during their visit on March 13th.

This paper draws on migration infrastructure perspectives to theorize how states select refugees. After the Cold War, the United States shifted its refugee admissions program from a focus on anticommunism toward more humanitarian criteria, marked by greater need-based selection and distributional equity – including explicit efforts to increase African admissions. Yet the 1990s saw the US resettle roughly 300,000 Europeans and just 40,000 Africans despite comparably large displacement crises in Yugoslavia and the Horn of Africa. Why? While scholars explain such disparities through explicit racial preferences or geopolitical interests, I show that inherited processing infrastructure shaped which humanitarian claims could be acted upon at scale. Decades of racist migration control and Cold War foreign policy had built networks of embassies, processing centers, and NGOs that could be rapidly deployed for Yugoslav displacement. African admissions, by contrast, required building capacity from scratch in an era of diminished support for refugee resettlement. Rather than viewing bureaucratic infrastructure as simply facilitating policy preferences, I show how the machinery of refugee resettlement shapes who moves quickly and at scale, and who moves slowly or not at all. This approach reveals how racialized disparities become embedded in migration governance itself, persisting even as stated priorities shift.

MDPI has launched a new journal Populations.  They have just reached their one year milestone.  You can read about their first year here. Here is some information about publishing with them: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/populations.

Seattle City Light is looking to partner with researchers to apply to a funding opportunity, Fire Science Innovations through Research and Education (FIRE) | NSF – U.S. National Science Foundation, by April 7. City Light has electricity generation infrastructure and transmission lines throughout Skagit, Whatcom, and Pend Oreille counties that we’re looking to protect from wildland fires. The NSD call fits within City Light’s planning for hazard work. Please reach out to tarney.sheldon@seattle.gov if interested in collaborating. 

Submit your work for the 2026 Annual IAPHS Conference in Portland, OR!

Theme: Reimagining Population Health Science to Build Trust and Influence​
​Dates: September 29 – October 2, 2026
​Submission Window: December 2, 2025 – March 10, 2026

Award amount: $2,500.000

Number of applications UW can put forward: 1

OR internal deadline: 3/11/2026

OSP deadline: 4/6/2026

Sponsor deadline: 4/15/2026

Program Description: Wildfire Smoke Preparedness in Community Buildings is a federal grant program to enhance community wildfire smoke preparedness. This program provides grants to states, federally recognized Tribes, public pre-schools, local educational agencies, and non-profit organizations for the assessment, prevention, control, or abatement of wildfire smoke hazards in community buildings and related activities. (read more)

The Interdisciplinary Minor in Data Science at UW (https://dataminor.uw.edu/) is organizing its first annual “Social Sciences Data Science Summer Institute,” which pairs undergraduate and graduate students with UW faculty or staff who are engaged in social science data science research during term A of Summer 2026 (June 22–July 22, 2026).  Applications are due from Faculty/Staff, Graduate, and Undergraduate students by March 13, 2026, 11:59 pm PST.

The Population Council invites applications for Editors, Population & Development Review (PDR). Individual applications as well as applications for Co-Editor teams that pair senior scholars working with mid-career scholars are welcomed by March 16, 2026. Two Editors will be appointed for a three-year term, beginning January 1, 2027. The term can be extended to five years total at the discretion of the Council.

Organization: William T. Grant Scholars Program 2026 (Limited Submission Opportunity)

Award amount:  Each Scholar receives exactly $425,000 over five years, including up to 7.5% indirect costs. Awards begin July 1 of the award year and are made to the applicant’s institution.

UW internal deadline: 03/18/2026

Description: The William T. Grant Scholars Program supports career development for promising early-career researchers. The program funds five-year research and mentoring plans that significantly expand researchers’ expertise in new disciplines, methods, and content areas. (read more)

The Population Health Applied Research Fellowship Program supports multidisciplinary teams of students to work on real-world population health challenges. Projects are sourced from external clients who play an important role in structuring project deliverables. Applications for this summer’s cohort will be accepted until 12 PM on March 20, from undergraduate and graduate students across all UW schools and colleges on all three UW campuses. The Summer 2026 Population Health Applied Research Fellowship team will work closely with stakeholders at the City of Seattle to research strengths and future recommendations to support children-friendly cities.

The European Doctoral School of Demography (EDSD) is an eleven-month, fully funded program that aims to provide students with a comprehensive and rigorous education in demography to pursue their doctoral studies. The EDSD provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the causes and consequences of demographic change, population data, statistical and mathematical demography, as well as modeling, simulation, and forecasting techniques. The program’s coursework, taught by leading experts in the field, emphasizes strengthening the quantitative and programming skills of its participants.

IPUMS announces the release of the latest ACS 5-year summary file data from IPUMS NHGIS, a new tool to help researchers understand linking counts between the ATUS and CPS, and even more geography variables from IPUMS USA.

IPUMS USA has added geography variables, including a new consistent PUMA variable, CPUMA1020, which creates consistent geographic boundaries across 2010 and 2020 PUMA definitions, spanning the 2012–2024 samples. Users can also find new Migration and Place-of-Work variables based on 2023 metropolitan statistical area (MSA) definitions.

IPUMS NHGIS has added the 2020-2024 5-Year Summary File from the American Community Survey (ACS). Nearly 1,200 new summary tables are now available for geographic areas as small as block groups. NHGIS also extended its time series tables to include 2020-2024 ACS 5-year data and added new 2024 GIS boundary files.

IPUMS ATUS has released ATUS-CPS Linking Counts, an interactive tool for exploring the number of ATUS respondents who can be linked to specific months of the CPS. Check out our latest blog post for an introduction of how to use this tool to take advantage of the research potential of the ATUS-CPS linkage