Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at CSDE! As a reminder, there will be no seminar this week due to the holiday.

CSDE’s Seminar Series will resume on Friday, December 1 with the Demography Student Poster Session & Lightning Talks, featuring the work of CSDE graduate students.

In her dissertation, Michelle O’Brien—a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and former CSDE Fellow and Trainee—aims to examine the long-term consequences of the Tajik Civil War on population change and migration. The Tajik civil war raged from 1992-1997, killing an estimated 60,000 and displacing a million residents to northern Tajikistan or Afghanistan. Most of the violence was concentrated in 1992 and 1993, but the experience of violence and uncertainty still emerges in discussions of daily life in Tajikistan today. To inform her research, O’Brien decided to spend the summer in Tajikistan in order to try to ‘get under the skin’ of the country. During her time there, she conducted interviews with key informants at non-government organizations that helped her understand the development strategies after the war, presented some of her preliminary quantitative findings to the United Nations Development Programme, traveled as much as she could, and made friends across the country.

Affiliate Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, Associate Professor of Epidemiology, co-authored a recent Crosscut article that addresses planning for gun violence in light of recent shootings across the nation. Within the past two months alone, there have been shootings in Las Vegas, San Antonio, and now Red Bluff, California. According to the authors, “We have become so inured to gun violence that we plan around it instead of planning to stop it.” One such effort to plan around gun violence is Stop the Bleed, a national campaign aimed at providing education and equipment that will enable individuals to stop fatal bleeding. The authors underscore the importance of the initiative’s efforts to empower individuals to take potentially life-saving action in the event of gun violence. “This is not a call to live in fear, but a call to live with awareness,” they said. “We are not helpless in the face of gun violence, and bleeding control is a step to reducing its harm."

Within the past couple of decades, academia has experienced not only an increase in competition for a decreasing amount of funding, but also the aging of the research workforce.  Furthermore, senior researchers are more likely to be awarded funding than are those in the beginnings, and perhaps even the middle, of their research careers. So while newer researchers may face difficulties in securing opportunities that will enable them to get their careers off the ground, relatively more experienced researchers may not be able to continue their career trajectory due to challenges in renewing or obtaining new grants. To combat these issues, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has created the “Next Generation Researchers Initiative,” which seeks to augment opportunities for early and mid-career researchers to secure funding.