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

• Afra Mashhadi--Assistant Professor, Computing & Software Systems, UW Bothell. Dr. Mashhadi is a research scientist in the domain of Ubiquitous Computing. She is interested in developing mathematical and computational models that leverage the proliferation of sensors and breakthroughs in machine learning to (1) understand societies and social phenomena at different spatial scales and (2) model social dynamics of human behavior.
• Leo Morales--Professor, Division of General Internal Medicine; Adjunct Professor, Health Services, UW Seattle. Dr. Morales’s research has focused on measurement of patient reported outcomes in diverse populations, and minority health and health disparities including immigrant and Latino Health. He serves as Chief Diversity Officer for the School of Medicine.
• Rebecca Rebbe--Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, University of Southern California. Dr. Rebbe's research examines the measurement of and community responses to child maltreatment. She has training using demographic methods and specializes in using population-based linked administrative datasets to better understand child maltreatment.
• Eric Waithaka--Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work, George Mason University. Dr. Waithanka's research focuses on intergenerational social and economic mobility during young adults’ transitions to adulthood, with a particular focus on the role of family capital (resources & processes) and public policies influence on young adults’ life outcomes.

CSDE Affiliates Mellisa Knox and Jessica Jones-Smith have recently been awarded a research grant from the UW RRF as co-PIs. Taxes on sweetened beverages have become an important policy response to growing obesity rates and the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the U.S. and other nations. Since 2015, eight U.S. cities have implemented these taxes, but so far direct evidence of their impacts on household purchasing behavior is scarce. This project will investigate the income-stratified household response to sweetened beverage taxes using a data set containing the purchasing behavior of approximately 500 households in the cities of Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, and Philadelphia.

Katie Wilson (UW Biostatistics) and CSDE Affiliate and Executive Committee Member Jon Wakefield recently published their methodological research in Demographic Research. Their work is motivated by the tension between demand for high-quality subnational estimates of under-5 mortality and data limitations in lower- and middle-income countries. In the paper, Wilson & Wakefield describe a computationally efficient, model-based approach that allows summary birth history and full birth history data to be combined into analyses of under-5 mortality in a natural way.

CSDE Affiliates Stephen Mooney, Heather Hill, and Ali Rowhani-Rabhar, with co-authors Kimberly Dalve, Caitlin Moe, Nicole Kovski, and Frederick Rivara, recently published research in Prevention Science, extending their collective work on the relationship between the earned income tax credit (EITC) and youth firearm violence. To estimate the association between state EITC and youth violence, the authors conducted a repeated cross-sectional analysis using the variation in state EITC generosity over time by state and self-reported data in the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) from 2005 to 2019, with additional association estimates stratified by sex and race.

CSDE Affiliate Bo Zhao along with co-authors Xiao Huang, Xiaoqi Bao (a past recipient of the CSDE Applied Research Fellowship), Zhenlong Li, and Shaozeng Zhang recently published an article in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers which has also been covered in Seattle's King 5 news. In this article, the authors assess the circumstances of Black-owned restaurants during the entire year of 2020 through a longitudinal quantitative analysis of restaurant patronage. Using multiple sources of geospatial big data, the analysis reveals that most Black-owned restaurants in this study are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic among different cities in the United States over time.

CSDE Affiliate Himanshu Grover has been awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation. The project is titled, "Assessing the Expectations Gap – Impact on Critical Infrastructure Service Providers’ and Consumers’ Preparedness, and Response." While community lifeline service providers and local emergency managers must maintain coordinated response and recovery plans, their timelines may not match expectations of local consumers of lifeline services. This project will provide government agencies, lifeline providers, and consumers with strong evidence to address the expectations gap and, in turn, promote appropriate preparedness actions that will increase community resilience. 

CSDE External Affiliate Rebecca Rebbe, Affiliate Joseph Mienko, and co-author Kierra Sattler recently published new research in Pediatrics. The article aims to determine the role of race/ethnicity and poverty in the likelihood of children younger than age 3 years hospitalized because of child abuse and neglect-related injuries being reported to child protective services (CPS) and being assigned a specific maltreatment diagnostic code. The authors used population-based linked administrative data from Washington state comprising of birth, hospitalization, and CPS records to explore these associations.

CSDE Director Sara Curran, along with a number of co-authors, recently penned a perspective article in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Global mapping efforts to date have relied on vague and oversimplified definitions of “abandoned” agricultural land which results in overestimates of the land area that is likely to support persistent increases in forest cover and associated carbon sequestration. The authors propose a new conceptualization of abandoned agricultural land that incorporates changes in landholding status over time into determining whether land should be considered as abandoned.

Join the National Science Foundation for a three-part lecture series featuring the laureates of the 2022 Alan T. Waterman award, the nation's highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers.  See the links below to learn more and register!

• 9/12/2022 (10-11 a.m. Pacific): Falls and aging — the need for biomedical solutions to a global problem. Speaker: Lara Thompson.
• 9/28/2022 (10-11 a.m. Pacific): Trends in U.S. faculty hiring and retention from ten years of data: a study of prestige, diversity and inequality. Speaker: Daniel Larremore.
  
• 10/11/2022 (10-11 a.m. Pacific): Past climates inform our future. Speaker: Jessica Tierney.

Grant & Contract Accounting (GCA) is inviting PIs to give a 30-to-45 minute Zoom presentation to its staff, in order to connect GCA to the fantastic work done at the UW.

GCA is an invaluable partner to anyone performing sponsored research at the UW. GCA manages the post award life of a budget from setup in the financial system through invoicing and reporting all the way to closeout. We literally could not work without them.

The National Institute for Health has several updated about previous and upcoming webinars:

• They have posted materials from their August 11th webinar: Understanding the New NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy. Materials from the presentation are available on the Learning page of the NIH Scientific Data Sharing website, including the webinar recording and resource slide deck which includes a list of helpful links.
• Part II of the August 11th webinar, Diving Deeper into the New NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy, will be held September 22nd. In this webinar, specialists will be expanding on information provided in Part 1 and diving deeper into topics like privacy protections for data from human participants and justifiable limitations on sharing data.
• Navigating Early Career Funding Opportunities will be held on Thursday, September 15th. This webinar will provide an overview of the fellowship and career development award types, networking and mentoring strategies, and other relevant advice for early-stage investigators.

We encourage your to take advantage of these informational resources! As always, if CSDE's teams can be of additional help with your research planning or an application, please let us know. You can submit your interest and plans to the proposal planning form or contact Belinda Sachs (belindab@uw.edu).