We are excited to host Emory University Associate Professor Ali Sewell as our guest speaker for this week's CSDE seminar. Drawing on historical data of state-implicated redlining, the research they are presenting considers the interlocking web of violence between communities and the people designated by the state to protect them.

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

After the seminar, CSDE Trainee Maxine Wright will facilitate a graduate student discussion with Dr. Sewell. Please RSVP to attend by emailing Maxine (mkw1208@uw.edu).

This seminar is co-sponsored with the Population Health Initiative.

We are delighted to announce that as winners of a Decoding Maternal Morbidity Data Challenge, there will be a team presentation by CSDE Affiliates Monica Keith and Melanie Martin at a virtual Winner's Webinar on March 16, 2022 from 11am – 1pm PST, sponsored by NICHD.  This webinar will be an opportunity for all winners of the Decoding Maternal Morbidity Data Challenge to highlight their “solutions” via a PowerPoint presentation to the extramural community and the general public at large.  The NICHD Director and Deputy Director will be attending this webinar to hear the winners' solutions and offer welcoming comments.

On February 3, 2022, the University of Toronto’s Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences recognized Adrian Raftery’s scientific contributions with an invitation to deliver the Keyfitz Lecture in Mathematics and the Social Sciences. Keyfitz was a Canadian demographer and pioneer in the field of mathematical demography. It was Keyfitz's 1972 article ‘On Future of Population' in the Journal of the American Statistical Association that first proposed probabilistic forecasting approaches in estimating future populations.  Thus, it was a fitting that 50 years later Raftery be invited to give this endowed lecture on the subject of Bayesian approaches to very long term population forecasts. To see more details about the lecture you can visit the Fields Institute’s announcement about the lecture and watch the lecture on YouTube. Congratulations Adrian! We at the UW feel very lucky to count you in our midsts!

CSDE Affiliate and project principle investigator Daniel Promislow,  CSDE Research Scientist Matt Dunbar, CSDE Affiliate Kyle Crowder, along with the other members of The Dog Aging Project Consortium published a new article in Nature titled, "An open science study of aging in companion dogs." This paper, also featured in UW Today, describes the methods of this large-scale data collection project, the availability of data, and its potential relevance to research around aging. These data present a unique, rich resource for studying the biomarkers of aging as well as longevity and the role of environment. The study also includes a clinical trial of an immunosuppressive drug that has been shown to improve longevity in lab animals.

UW Today featured new research from CSDE Affiliate Nora Kenworthy and UW Sociology student Mark Igra last week. The source article, published in the American Journal of Public Health, analyzes data from GoFundMe campaigns between 2016 and 2020. Augmenting this data with state- and county-level measures of income and medical debt, the authors explore the relationship between crowdfunding success and income inequality.

CSDE Fellow Neal Marquez and co-authors from the UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project recently published a new paper in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, available in full HERE. The article presents an analysis of mortality records from the Florida State Department of Corrections prison system in 2019 and 2020, comparing these records to the overall Florida population. The authors find that COVID-19 decreased life expectancy of the prison population by four years.

The 60th Volume of Population Review, a peer-reviewed journal of social demography first published in 1957, recently came to press featuring the 10 most-downloaded articles since the journal has been digitally available. One of these top-ten articles is co-authored by CSDE Affiliate David Swanson with his colleagues Mary McGehee and Nazrul Hoque. Their 2009 paper, "Socio-Economic Status and Life Expectancy in the United States, 1970–1990," interrogates the connection between social inequality and population health outcomes. Congratulations, David!

CSDE Affiliate, UW Chief Strategy Officer for Population Health, and Professor of Health Metrics Sciences Ali Mokdad was recently given in a spotlight in UW Today. The article covered the arc of Mokdad's career at the CDC, what drew him to UW, the connections across his work experiences in public health, and how that has informed his role and led to projects such as the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation COVID-19 projections which are regularly cited by news outlets.

The Computational Demography Working Group is meeting February 9th at 2-3PM on Zoom (register HERE) with CSDE Alumni and NIH T32 Data Science & Demography Fellow Emily Pollock (PhD Anthropology UW, 2021), PHAM/PE Fellow, Division of STD Prevention, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Emily's dissertation focused on demographic effects on dynamic network model simulations as well as the pros and cons of expedited partner treatment as a prevention method for chlamydia transmission among young adults. Emily is currently a fellow in the Prevention Effectiveness Fellowship’s inaugural Public Health Analytics & Modeling track at the CDC, working in the Division of STD Prevention. She works on modeling projects related to a variety of disease dynamics to support and evaluate diagnostic and prevention activities. Emily is excited to come back and talk with her extended CSDE family!

The Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences seminar this week will feature Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a demographer at the Minnesota Population Center and Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Wrigley-Field will present her research on the uniformly small racial disparities during the 1918 pandemic and potential explanations. You can register for this Zoom event HERE.

On June 17th and 18th, 2022, the University of Utah’s Asia Center will host a conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, for scholars researching population, health and migration in contexts of Asia affected by armed conflict and organized violence. The purpose of this conference is to support, discuss, disseminate and elevate the profile of scholarship on armed conflict, population and health, and to demonstrate the significance of PHAC globally and especially within Asia. There is no registration fee, and conference sponsors will cover participants’ airfare (up to $500), ground transportation, meals during the conference, and two-three nights of accommodation. Applications are due March 1, 2022.