This week CSDE will be hosting Kevin Lybarger, Postdoctoral Fellow at UW Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education. Lybarger will present on using data-driven information extraction models to capture information about the social determinants of health, what is being uncovered with new modeling methods, and upcoming projects that will use these tools.

You can register for this seminar HERE,  and check out all the upcoming topics and register for future seminars on our website.

This event is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative.

CSDE’s Executive Committee is pleased to introduce four of our new UW Faculty Affiliates:

• Mia Bennett—Assistant Professor, Geography. Dr. Bennett is a political geographer skilled in geospatial methods. Through fieldwork and remote sensing, she researches the geopolitics of development in northern frontiers, namely the Arctic, Russian Far East, and along the more remote corridors of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. She is particularly interested in the role of Indigenous Peoples in leading infrastructure development in the North American Arctic.
• Yuan Hsiao—Assistant Professor, Communication. Dr. Hsiao's major research explores the intersection of political communication, social media, and social networks. He is particularly interested in bringing a social network perspective to understanding a variety of communication and social processes, such as how networks on social media contribute to protest mobilization, how social interactions shape the production of misinformation and public opinion, how spatial and social relationships affect the spread of religion, or how community networks affect health behavior.
• Oliver Rollins—Assistant Professor, American Ethnic Studies. Dr. Rollins is a qualitative sociologist who works on issues of race/racism in and through science and technology. Specifically, his research explores how racial identity, racialized discourses, and systemic practices of social difference influence, engage with, and are affected by, the making and use of neuroscientific technologies and knowledges.
• Emma Spiro—Associate Professor at the Information School; Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Sociology. Dr. Spiro studies online communication and information-related behaviors in the context of emergencies and disaster events. Recently, she has focused on investigating misinformation online. Her work also explores the structure and dynamics of interpersonal and organizational networks in both online and offline environments.

CSDE Affiliate Engi Attia co-authored a recent article in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome that tested the effects of Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) on children in Kenya. Older children with PHIV commonly experience impaired lung function. The research suggests that for children with PHIV, those who received ART in their first twelve months of infancy had preserved lung function as they grew older.

Published in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, CSDE Affiliate Heather Hill and co-author Christina Gibson-Davis' recent article serves as an introduction to the journal's issue on wealth inequality and child development and provides detailed background and conceptual framework of the inequity of wealth in households with children. The authors present demographic breakdowns of the wealth and income of child households across household characteristics including race, child age, and parents' marital status, discuss the contributions made in this issue, and discuss policy implications.

The Lighting Up Native Aspirations (LUNA) program is built of a strong network of highly trained Indigenous scholars dedicated to culturally relevant research who are contributing to ameliorating health disparities among Indigenous populations. This program provides a unique interdisciplinary training opportunity in Indigenous health and health disparities research. Trainees will have access to scientific mentors across fields (e.g., life sciences, neuroscience, psychology, public health) as well as in-depth experiences with critical substantive training areas that they may not have exposure to in more traditional biomedical, clinical, or behavioral research programs.