Come celebrate the start of the quarter with CSDE! Catch up with your colleagues, meet new affiliates, fellows, and trainees, and find out what is new at CSDE. Refreshments provided.

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CSDE is offering a series of two, three-hour workshops on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using esri’s ArcMap software. It assumes no prior experience with GIS. The workshop will take place across two consecutive Mondays, beginning October 2, 2017. Sessions run from 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM in Savery 117.

Welcome back to the academic year! Thanks to the good news about the renewal of CSDE’s research infrastructure grant from NICHD’s Population Dynamics Branch, CSDE starts the academic year with renewed energy and new plans.  You can read about the award here. Notably, the strong support from the College of Arts & Sciences and from units across UW means that we can grow our support for UW’s community of population scientists.  We’re looking forward to working with all of you over the next five years!

Visiting affiliate Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar has been invited to join the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture as a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and Impact and Assessment Manager. Previously a Visiting Scholar at the Southeast Asia Center at the Jackson School of International Studies, she has most recently developed curriculum for the Seattle Community Colleges; taught sociology courses on race, immigration, inequality, and belonging at Seattle University and the University of Puget Sound; and published in a variety of scholarly journals.

In a recent article, affiliate Emily Williams–Associate Professor of Health Services–and colleagues examine smoking and alcohol use patterns among military members to determine whether experiences of sexual assault or harassment pose an increased risk for these behaviors. In the article, which was published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, the authors find that individuals have unique responses to experiences of sexual trauma in the military depending on their gender and history of smoking or alcohol use.

Affiliates Jennifer Otten (lead author), Jake Vigdor, and Mark Long (along with UW colleagues James Buszkiewicz, Wesley Tang, Anju Aggarwal and Adam Drewnowski) recently published a paper titled “The Impact of a City-Level Minimum-Wage Policy on Supermarket Food Prices in Seattle-King County” in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 

Affiliate Betty Bekemeier, Assistant Professor in Psychosocial & Community Health, recently co-authored an article that aims to assess the gap between spending on foundational public health services by local health jurisdictions (LHJs) and the costs for these jurisdictions to provide them. In the article, which was published in the August issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, Bekemeier and her co-authors find that spending by sampled LHJs is just 65% of what is needed to provide foundational public health services.

Affiliate Scott Allard, Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, was quoted in an Atlantic article about new Census data that indicate improvements in the nation’s poverty rate. According to Allard, who published the book Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty earlier this year, “it looks like the labor market growth is finally reaching down to some of our most vulnerable populations.”