NICHD has just launched the Decoding Maternal Morbidity Data Challenge. This challenge invites teams of scholars to work together using the Nulliparous Pregnancy Outcomes Study: Monitoring Mothers-to-be (nuMoM2b) to design innovative approaches to improving maternal outcomes. There is a $50,000 prize for each of 7 teams and for others up to $10,000 – prizes will be awarded by NICHD. CSDE and the eScience Institute have teamed up to support teams comprised of UW faculty and students (along with others outside of UW) who plan on participating in the challenge.

CSDE’s scientific staff and faculty are available for consultation and discussion at any point in the process, email Tyler McCormick (tylermc@uw.edu) or csde_consult@uw.edu with inquiries. Don’t hesitate to reach out! (read more)

CSDE is co-sponsoring panel talks on Academic Midlife with DemSemX, a coalition of population centers from across the U.S. This will be an exciting opportunity to learn about the career paths of eminent scholars after they received tenure. Within academia, there is a lot of focus and advice around getting tenure—understandably, as it represents a singular evaluation hurdle within tenure-granting institutions. Yet, academic careers can be long, and there are many decisions to be made after tenure about how to invest one’s time and energy. In the upcoming session on July 30th at 11am PT/2pm ET, Adam Gamoran (William T. Grant Foundation), Jennifer Glass (UT Austin), and Zhenchao Qian (Brown University) will discuss midlife in academia and how they have approached choices within their careers. The Zoom link for the event is here. (read more)

UW Statistics Doctoral Student Nicholas Irons and CSDE Affiliate Adrian Raftery recently published new research in PNAS  estimating the ‘true prevalence’ of COVID-19 in the US. Among other contributions, they introduce a statistical framework that incorporates key COVID-19 data from multiple sources to model the true prevalence of this disease in the United States and individual states. Their approach projects that in the U.S. as many as 60% of COVID-19 cases went undetected as of March 7, 2021, the last date for which the dataset they employed is available. To read more about the research, please see the article. (read more)

CSDE Affiliate Rachel Fyall and CSDE Trainee Matt Fowle recently completed a report on COVID-19 impacts on low income tenants’ housing security in Washington State (report available here). Their report was highlighted on the front page of the Seattle Times on July 21, 2021. With funding from the UW’s West Coast Poverty Center and the Population Health Initiative, Fyall and Fowle find that the pandemic led to downward residential mobility, increased rental debt, and poorer housing quality for low-income households. The pandemic has exacerbated the negative impact of housing insecurity on health as tenants are spending more time in substandard housing that is harmful to their physical and mental health. Overall, households of color have been disproportionately affected by this worsening housing security, in particular Black and Latinx tenants. The eviction moratorium has likely been successful in preventing a surge in formal evictions during the pandemic. However, methods of informal evictions and forced moves, such as landlords changing door locks and refusing to renew leases, have significantly increased. Their study employed a mixed methods approach in partnership with the Tenants Union of Washington State, draws on semi-structured interviews (n=25) and a survey (n=410) with low-income tenants to examine the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic and eviction moratoria have impacted housing security in Washington State. (read more)

On Thursday, July 22, UW Sociology PhD Candidate Yuan Hsiao successfully defended his dissertation entitled, “How social media affects political action: the effects of digital network structures and motivations on movement participation.” His project was innovative and incisive, drawing on the expertise of an excellent committee that included Steven Pfaff (Chair), Kate Stovel, Emilio Zagheni and Jevin West (iSchool). The project takes on the implications of utilizing social media for political purposes, specifically support for and involvement in protest movements. Although most scholars agree that social media can propel political change,  the mechanisms underlying why social media affects political action remain unclear. Yuan's dissertation uses micro and meso-level perspectives to examine these mechanisms. Drawing on the cases of the Sunflower [pro-democracy and national self-determination] Movement in Taiwan and Black Lives Matter Sacramento in the US, the dissertation assembles original survey data and digital trace data to unravel the psychological and network processes that underlie the mobilizing power of social media. Hsiao had a very productive experience in the Sociology department, publishing more than a dozen papers in top journals in three fields (sociology, communication, political science) and earning an MS in Statistics. He will be joining the Communication Department at the UW in the Fall as an Assistant Professor. (read more)