When: Friday, 10/09/2026 @ 12:30-1:30 PM PT
Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here)

We are looking forward to hosting Jamaica Corker, Independent Research & Technical Consultant, on Friday, Oct. 9th in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. In addition, there are opportunities to meet 1-1 with Dr. Corker throughout the day.

CSDE External Affiliate Jane J. Lee (Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, University of Southern California) and CSDE Affiliates David Huh (Indigenous Wellness Research Institute), E. Roberto Orellana (School of Social Work), and Susan M. Graham (School of Medicine), along with co-authors, recently published a research article in Prevention Science titled, “Evaluation of a Community-Based Social Media Campaign for HIV Prevention Among Latino Sexual Minority Men.”

The first Evans School of Public Policy and Governance Research seminar of the year will feature CSDE affiliate Kristian Jones (Social Work) in which he will give a talk titled “What Happens in a Mentoring Intervention Intended to Prevent Firearm Violence?” The seminar will take place on Wednesday, Oct 7, from 11:30-12:30, in Parrington Hall 360. Congratulations Dr. Jones, and we hope that newsletter readers can join the CSDE and Evans communities for this exciting event!

CSDE External Affiliate Laura Lindberg (School of Public Health, Rutgers University) and co-author Isaac Maddow-Zimet (Guttmacher Institute) recently published an article in Contraception titled, “Declining Response Rates and Emerging Challenges for Studying Sexual and Reproductive Health Using the National Survey of Family Growth.” The National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), a longstanding resource for sexual and reproductive health research, saw a nearly 40-percentage-point drop in response rates in its 2022-2023 round alongside a shift to a predominantly online design.

This month, recent participant in CSDE’s Grant Writing Summer Program, Allison Meisner (Assistant Professor, Cancer Prevention Program, Public Health Sciences Division, Fred Hutch and Affiliate Professor, UW Department of Global Health), received a Notice of Award from the National Institute of Health for her project titled, “Personalized Guidance for Menopausal Hormone Therapy”. This project aims to use data from the UK Biobank and Kaiser Permanente Research Bank to provide individualized guidance on the use of menopausal hormone therapy.

CSDE Affiliate Scott Allard was quoted in a Washington State Standard article titled, “WA Voters of Color More Likely to Have Ballots Challenged, per Report.” The piece covers an analysis of Washington state election data, presented to state lawmakers by University of Washington researchers, showing that younger voters and voters of color have their ballots challenged for signature issues at disproportionately higher rates. 

CSDE External Affiliate David Swanson (UC Irvine) co-authored a new book with Barry Edmonston and Sharon M. Lee, published this month by Springer Nature. Immigration in Canada and the United States: Two Nations, Two Approaches presents a comparative analysis of immigration and immigrants in both countries using an applied demographic framework, which emphasizes practical and policy issues related to population size and change, demographic and socioeconomic composition, and geographic distribution. 

Each quarter, CSDE offers workshops on data sources, statistical and biomarker methodology, introductions to statistical programming languages, 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 coming academic year, CSDE will offer a diverse and exciting set of workshops in a remote format. 

CSDE has now launched a website for your reports and policy recommendations stemming from your population research.  We welcome your reports and they will involve minimal editorial feedback from us.  We will ask you for an abstract, an image that illustrates the findings of your report, and we will provide you with a template for publishing your report via Canva.  For more information, contact our publications editor (John Downes via his email csde@uw.edu).

CSDE PIs please be sure to keep your required trainings up-to-date and visit the PI resource page to find what you need!  If you’ve never taken it, be sure to take the required Grants Management Training. In addition, be sure to create your SciENcv account and generate your biosketch and current and pending support.  Once you do so, it is easy to make updates and that will make your life easier when applying for grants and being included on others’ grant applications.

The Center for Social Science Computation and Research (CSSCR) at UW will be hosting a series of workshops on campus throughout the autumn quarter. Details for each workshop are below.

The September 2026 issue of Studies in Family Planning, a journal of the Population Council, is now available. Highlights include a commentary on addressing women’s concerns about contraception and future fertility, and a new client-experience measure for injectable contraceptive care developed and tested with 400 women in Lilongwe, Malawi. 

The Natural Hazards Center, with funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, has launched the Health and Extreme Weather Research Award Program to address gaps in knowledge about the health risks and consequences of wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, floods, extreme heat, and other extreme weather events. Findings from funded research will help communities across the United States understand and reduce health risks associated with extreme weather. 

To support our faculty in their efforts to secure external funding, especially our new and early career faculty, the Office of Research has started offering an annual information session on Limited Submissions Opportunities.

Many federal agencies and foundations offer grants, awards, and fellowships that limit the number of applications that can come from one institution. If you are interested in applying to one of these opportunities, you should know about the UW Limited Submission Opportunities (LSOs) application process.

Description: Search engines increasingly display AI-generated answers above organic links, potentially displacing traffic to upstream publishers. We estimate the impact of Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) on Wikipedia’s search traffic using AIO’s staggered geographic rollout and Wikipedia’s multilingual structure. Our difference-in-differences design compares monthly external-search referrals to English Wikipedia articles with referrals to the same articles in German and French, and finds that default AIO availability reduced English search traffic by 5.45% and 4.82% , respectively. 

Georgetown McCourt School’s Massive Data Institute and Mathematica will host a webinar on October 7 (2:30–3:30 PM ET) examining recent changes to federal data collection and their implications for research. As federal agencies terminate or modify data collections, cut staff, revise data policies, and reduce external scientific oversight, the session will explore what these shifts mean for evidence-based policymaking and preview what may come next. 

RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Call for Papers

ISSUE ON “Wealth and Family Economics: How Much Wealth Is Needed to Achieve Social and Economic Benchmarks? Insights from New Measures and Concepts”

The Dan David Prize is the largest history prize in the world with an annual purse of $3 million. The committee awards up to nine prizes of $300,000 each year to outstanding early and midcareer scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines. The Dan David Prize is the flagship project of the Dan David Foundation, an independent charitable organization based in Liechtenstein, which supports research, higher education and breakthrough achievements in the humanities and sciences.

Description: Latent variable models such as item response theory (IRT) models and structural equation modeling (SEM) are widely used in social science. Traditional latent variable models heavily rely on multivariate Gaussian assumptions to model dependence among multiple latent variables. However, the Gaussian dependence structures are limited to linear, symmetric, and tail-independent relationships. In this talk, I present two studies that address these limitations by incorporating asymmetric copulas to model tail dependence between latent variables in IRT and SEM.

The UW EDGE Center (Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics, and Environment, a NIEHS P30 Center) intends to provide pilot funding (up to $40K) to members of the faculty of UW, Seattle Children’s Hospital, and/or the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. We encourage early career scientists to partner with faculty to apply. Pre-applications for environmental health sciences research are due November 19, 2026, invited full proposals are due January 12, 2027, and funding begins no sooner than April 2027.

Danah Boyd is coming to Seattle to share insights from her new book “Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census.”  She’ll be joined at Town Hall by Ron Jarmin, the former Acting Director of the US Census Bureau. Come join them for a fun conversation about democracy’s data.

The Sheldon Danziger Pipeline Grants Competition for early-career researchers supports early-career scholars who are underrepresented in the social sciences and/or who are employed at under-resourced institutions. The competition seeks to support a cohort of scholars who are diverse in their geographic origins, life experiences, and community backgrounds. Only researchers who have not previously received a trustee or presidential research grant or fellowship from RSF will be eligible to apply. 

Description: Cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) are widely used in educational and psychological assessment to provide fine-grained information about individuals’ mastery of specific skills or attributes. Partial-mastery cognitive diagnostic models (PM-CDMs) extend traditional CDMs by allowing latent attribute mastery to vary continuously rather than being restricted to binary mastery indicators. In PM-CDMs, each individual is characterized by a fixed continuous latent mastery vector, from which item-specific binary attribute profiles are independently generated. This formulation provides a bridge between CDMs and continuous latent variable models.

The Call for Papers for the 18th Conference of Young Demographers is now open! The conference will take place at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague on 3–5 February 2027. You can find all the necessary information, including the submission form in the Call for Papers. The deadline for submission is 26 October 2026. For more information, please visit the conference website.

The University of Washington Office of Public Lectures presents: What Feeds Us: Science, Climate, and the Future of Food with Dr. Pamela Ronald

Monday, October 26th at 6:30pm

Suggested ticket price $10
Where: Town Hall Seattle (1119 8th Ave, Seattle, WA 98101)

Register here

Description: Historical archives preserve some of the written record, yet social scientists are interested in more than just facts. We are also interested in taken for granted cultural assumptions, such as how much prestige was accorded to certain occupations in different historical periods. In this talk I ask whether large language models, trained on vast historical text, can recover these lost “collective mentalities,” and whether we can trust that recovery as faithful. 

Core Research Grants provide up to $200,000 for PhD holders to conduct research projects aligned with RSF’s research priorities and special initiatives. Funds can be used for salary support and research expenses in accordance with RSF budget guidelines. Grants over $75,000 include 15 percent in indirect costs. RSF is accepting Letters of Inquiry for the following programs: Social, Political and Economic Inequality (SPEI);  Future of Work (FOW); Implications of the 2023 Supreme Court Decision to Ban Race-Conscious Admissions at Colleges and Universities for Educational Attainment and Economic Mobility (SCD23).

Seminar—Quantification as an Epistemic Practice: Activist Documentation of Anti-Trans Violence in Brazil 

Thursday, October 29, 2026 at 10 ET/2pm GMT/3pm CET (Check in your time zone here)

Sign up to receive the Zoom link on the day.

The Center on Aging, Health, & Environment has a new call out for seed grant proposals. Additional information here!

Proposal Deadline: October 30, 2026

People who have contact with the criminal justice system experience disproportionate social and health disadvantage both prior to and following their justice involvement, compared to the broader community. Achieving equity in areas such as health, housing, and education among people with justice system involvement should be a global priority. Simultaneously, the need to reduce offending and recidivism is central to improving public safety, strengthening justice system legitimacy, and reducing future victimisation.

In partnership with the Center for Aging and Policy Studies and Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University, The Milbank Quarterly will publish a special issue to advance knowledge on the connections between policies and population health in a changing U.S. context. The special issue seeks empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions on the topic.

The IUSSP Early Career Awards aim to honour outstanding contributions to the broad field of population studies by early career scholars in different world regions and boost the global visibility of their achievements. Nominate colleagues by November 1, 2026. Nominees must have received their PhD within the last seven years and be IUSSP members. For more information about the Award and the nomination procedure and to fill out the application form, please go to IUSSP Early Career Awards.

Health Policy Fellows

Organization: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Award amount: Up to $195,000

Sponsor deadline: 11/03/2026

The countdown to the sixth UN World Data Forum has begun! Registration is now open for the biggest global gathering of data and statistics leaders, policymakers, innovators, researchers and development partners, taking place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from 9–12 November 2026.

Panel—A Conversation with Queerdem* Europe

Tuesday, November 10, 2026 at 9am ET/2pm GMT/3pm CET (Check in your time zone here)

Sign up to receive the Zoom link on the day.

The University of Colorado Population Center, part of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, is pleased to announce the 2026 Reproductive Demography Workshop, November 11-13, 2026 in Boulder, Colorado and online. The workshop will provide training on reproductive demography (including conception, pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, and birth).

The Scholars-in-Residence Program offers both long-term and short-term fellowships designed to support and encourage top-quality research and writing on the history, politics, literature, and culture of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora, as well as to promote and facilitate interdisciplinary exchange among scholars and writers in residence at the Schomburg Center. Awards can range from $3,000-$35,000. 

The Russell Sage Foundation’s Margaret Olivia Sage (MOS) Grants support research by multi- or inter-disciplinary teams on social, economic, and political challenges with generational consequences for social and living conditions in the United States. Such challenges are typically national in scope, involve both systemic and individual factors, and the questions they raise are as urgent for policymakers and communities as they are for researchers. 

The NIH’s Development of Collaborative Research Facilities or Research-Resource Facilities program (PAR-26-106) supports the construction or modernization of shared-use research facilities that benefit broad research communities, through two tracks: the Biomedical Research Facilities (BRF) program, funding $2–8 million for facilities advancing basic, translational, clinical, or behavioral science research, and the HIV/AIDS Research Facilities (HRF) program, funding $2–4 million for facilities aligned with NIH Office of AIDS Research priorities. 

CACHE will be at the GSA 2026 Annual Scientific Meeting, November 4 – 7 in National Harbor, MD, and is organizing a symposium “Pushing the Boundaries on Aging-Climate Topics and Methodologies”. To learn more about the GSA and to connect with leaders in aging and gerontology, find out more here. This year’s theme: “Reinforcing Resilience in Aging Science, Research and Education.”

Seminar—TBD with Dr. Byron Villacis

Tuesday, December 8, 2026 at 11:30am EST/4:30pm GMT/5:30pm CET (Check in your time zone here)

Sign up to receive the Zoom link on the day.

(read more)

The International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS) is pleased to invite submissions for a special issue on the theme of “Artificial Intelligence for Population Data Science.”  Submissions have been extended until December 11, 2026. The Call for Papers (CfP) for this Special Issue is here.

(read more)

Demographic Research invites contributions to the Special Collection on Kinship Demography: Structures, Dynamics, and Inequalities in the journal Demographic Research, organized by Ashton Verdery, Bussarawan Puk Teerawichitchainan, Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, and Elena Maria Pojman. Submissions to this collection are possible from June 15, 2026 until December 15, 2026. Please find more information on the collection’s description and goals as well as on submission procedures here.

Seminar—TBD with Dr. Christopher A. Julian

Thursday, January 7, 2027 at 10am EST/3pm GMT/4pm CET (Check in your time zone here)

Sign up to receive the Zoom link on the day.

(read more)

Call for Papers for the Special Collection “Measuring Population Health in the Era of Climate Change” in Population Health Metrics. The collection focuses on how climate change is reshaping population health and on methodological and empirical advances to measure these impacts. Submissions due February 26, 2027.

Seminar—Examining transnational families: Cross-perspectives from administrative data and statistical surveys

Thursday, March 18, 2027 at 9am EST/1pm GMT/2pm CET (Check in your time zone here)

Sign up to receive the Zoom link on the day.

(read more)

BMC Geriatrics is currently welcoming submissions of original research to a “War and aging” Collection. CSDE Affiliate Amy Hagopian is one of three Guest Editors for the Collection, with Rolf Kleber and Alice Aiken. If you’re interested in submitting a manuscript for the BMC Geriatrics Collection, submissions will be welcomed anytime until 30 April 2027.

The Collection welcomes original research addressing climate adaptation challenges across Africa, with particular interest in studies that provide credible scientific evidence, innovative analytical approaches, and practical solutions to support climate-resilient development. The Collection is particularly interested in interdisciplinary research involving climate science, earth observation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, socio-economic analysis, governance, indigenous knowledge, early warning systems, climate risk assessment, adaptation planning, nature-based solutions, and community-led approaches.

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