CSDE is thankful for all the speakers and attendees who participated in this winter’s seminar series! If you missed a seminar or wish to revisit one, visit our YouTube Channel where you can find them here: https://www.youtube.com/@csdemainaccount9165/streams

We look forward to welcoming new speakers during our spring series, to be announced in the coming weeks. We will continue with the punch card program next quarter (attend 6 seminars, receive 6 punches on your card, and you’re eligible for a drawing during our end-of-year celebration!). Wishing you all a rejuvenating spring break!

CSDE Affiliate Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen (Urban Design and Planning, Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences) released new research with colleagues in Science of the Total Environment, titled “Identifying recurrent and persistent landslides using satellite imagery and deep learning: A 30-year analysis of the Himalaya“. This paper presents a remote sensing-based method to efficiently generate multi-temporal landslide inventories and identify recurrent and persistent landslides. Authors used free data from Landsat, nighttime lights, digital elevation models, and a convolutional neural network model to develop the first multi-decadal inventory of landslides across the Himalaya, spanning from 1992 to 2021. The work reveals that most landslides in the Himalayas are not new, demonstrating how "landslides follow landslides."

CSDE Affiliates Rachel Prusynski (Rehabilitation Medicine) and Tracy Mroz (Rehabilitation Medicine) published an article with co-authors in JAMA Health Forum, titled “Differences in Home Health Services and Outcomes Between Traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage“. Private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans recently surpassed traditional Medicare (TM) in enrollment. However, MA plans are facing scrutiny for burdensome prior authorization and potential rationing of care, including home health. MA beneficiaries are less likely to receive home health, but recent evidence on differences in service intensity and outcomes among home health patients is lacking. This study sought to examine differences in home health service intensity and patient outcomes between MA and TM.

CSDE Affiliate Jeremy Hess (Emergency Medicine, Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, Global Health) co-authored new research in Pathogens, titled “Modeling the Role of Weather and Pilgrimage Variables on Dengue Fever Incidence in Saudi Arabia“. The first case of dengue fever (DF) in Saudi Arabia appeared in 1993 but by 2022, DF incidence was 11 per 100,000 people. Climatologic and population factors, such as the annual Hajj, likely contribute to DF’s epidemiology in Saudi Arabia. In this study, authors assess the impact of these variables on the DF burden of disease in Saudi Arabia and attempt to create robust DF predictive models. Findings can inform DF early warning systems and preparedness in Saudi Arabia.

CSDE Affiliate Arni Rao (Laboratory for Theory and Mathematical Modeling, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University) recently delivered the C. Chandrasekharan Memorial Lecture for the year 2024 at the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, India, titled “Stochastic Modeling in Cardiology Research“. While in India, Rao was also honored as a 2023 Fellow of ISPS (Indian Society for Probability and Statistics) for his important contributions at the intersection of mathematical modeling and population health.

CSDE Affiliate David Swanson (Sociology, UC Riverside) authored new research in Canadian Studies in Population, titled “Models for Estimating Intrinsic r and the Mean Age of a Population at Stability: Evaluations at the National and Sub-national Level“. Using Canada’s provinces and territories in conjunction with the “Cohort Change Ratio” approach to generating a stable population, Swanson tested the accuracy of regression models constructed from national-level data designed to estimate two factors of a population at stability from initial conditions at the sub-national levels: (1) its constant rate of change, denoted here by r'; and (2) mean population age. He found that these models provide reasonably accurate estimates. In the tests at the subnational level, the accuracy, as expected, is less, but the results indicate that the national level models provide estimates that are useful because they are tractable and provide information not available from the traditional analytical approaches. They also show that there are connections between initial conditions and stability that have been overlooked.

The NICHD has listed many grant opportunities that should be of interest to CSDE affiliates. Check out the list here. If you are interested, CSDE can help you with providing ‘eyes’ for feedback on the narrative, contacting a program officer, more formalized mock review panel of experts to provide feedback on a penultimate draft, a summer grant writing program, or scientific methods consultations. We’re happy to support your science! Just ask!

Population Research Planning Grants (PRPGs) are designed to provide in-kind support and/or funds of up to $25k* to support a wide array of activity types throughout the development of a research project. As part of our mission to complement rather than duplicate other campus opportunities such as the Population Health Initiative seed grants, we will consider funding a variety of activities. See a list of example activities in the full story! 

CSDE Matching Support includes in-kind or monetary support to accompany a submission to other on-campus funding mechanism, such as PHI, EarthLab, or Urban@UW. All projects must have a CSDE affiliate who is UW faculty and is listed as a PI or co-PI, with any number of other collaborators. Note that we require (PRPGs) or strongly suggest (matching funds) contacting either Development Core Director (Steven Goodreau) or CSDE Director (Sara Curran) to discuss possibilities for your specific proposal before submission.

Applications are now open for the Population Health Applied Research Fellowship Program. This program is run in partnership between the Population Health Initiative and CSDE. The 10-week program is open to graduate and professional students from all UW schools and colleges. The program supports multidisciplinary teams of UW graduate and undergraduate students to work on real-world population health challenges. Projects are sourced from external clients who play an important role in structuring project deliverables.

As the first major deliverable of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) announced the ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health, which commits $100 million towards transformative research and development in women’s health. ARPA-H will seek funding proposals with revolutionary, evidence-based ideas from a diverse mix of scientific visionaries to improve the lives of millions of women. Awardees will develop unconventional approaches and innovative new avenues to push high-impact biomedical research forward. 

Registration for the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods is now open for their topical workshops and general session. Their general sessions run from June 10-July 5, and from July 8-August 2. Topical Workshops cover a single subject and run for either 20 or 40 hours in just three, five, or ten days, and run from May through August. Sessions and workshops are available online and in-person at the University of Michigan.

Are you a grad student or postdoc who is interested in exploring interdisciplinary climate and social justice frameworks, and applying them to your work? Consider applying to the UW Climate Impacts Group and Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative’s first-ever Science Justice Summer School! This free two-week program will dive into a range of justice-related topics through lectures, discussion groups and more. Applications close Monday, March 11 at 11:59 p.m. 

The application for the Modelers and Storytellers: Transdisciplinary Training to Advance Community Health Intervention Research is now open! This is a no-cost, two-week virtual training to prepare predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees and early career researchers to apply systems and/or data science methods to community-engaged health disparities research. The priority deadline for applications is Monday, March 11 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

IAPHS greatly values and encourages student participation at the annual conference. The 2024 conference in St. Louis, Missouri will offer a variety of sessions of interest to students with lunchtime sessions specifically planned for students. They are pleased to offer travel scholarship funds for a limited number of students to attend the conference. Applications will be accepted beginning January 10, 2024 and will close on March 11, 2024. Learn more here.

The National Academy of Sciences has opened their Catalyst Award Competition, which seeks to reward bold, new, potentially transformative ideas to improve the physical, mental, or social well-being and health of people as they age, in a measurable and equitable way. They will issue up to 18 Catalyst Awards in 2024 to U.S.-based innovators. Each Catalyst Award includes a $50,000 cash prize in addition to other benefits. This opportunity was shared with us from UW’s team monitoring corporate and foundation opportunities.

The reissue of the two NIH Career Enhancement Award to Advance Research on Firearm Injury and Mortality Prevention K18s are now live, including the Career Enhancement Award to Advance Research on Firearm Injury and Mortality Prevention (CT required) and the Career Enhancement Award to Advance Research on Firearm Injury and Mortality Prevention (CT not allowed). Eligible candidates are independent investigators at any faculty rank or level.

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Join the National Academies for a workshop exploring how an Earth systems science approach could be used to address climate change impacts and their influence on human migration, building on the 2021 report Next Generation Earth Systems Science at the National Science Foundation. To learn more about this workshop, visit the event webpage. The event will take place on March 18th from 10:00am-4pm (ET) and March 19th from 10am-1pm (ET).

There is a Limited Submission Opportunity (LSO) for UW researchers and collaborators to take up the leadership of the General Social Survey (GSS) and the International Social Survey Program (ISSP).  The NSF solicitation can be found here.  This major effort to continue and innovate the longstanding surveys with funding from the NSF requires only one submission from an institution.  Within the UW, the Limited Submissions Office will select one competitive applicant. 

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The Office of Population Research at Princeton University presents the Queer Demography Summit on Friday, March 29th from 8am to 6pm (ET). This historic day-long summit brings together some of the nation’s and the world’s leading demographers of queer populations to discuss the state of queer demography. It will examine how the field has challenged and advanced general understandings of core demographic methods and research practices, as well as contributed substantive new knowledge on queer people’s health and wellbeing, family dynamics, migration patterns, experiences of inequality, and much more. This summit will be conducted in a hybrid format, with a required registration. Register for in-person here and for the Zoom webinar here.

The Russell Sage Foundation is accepting applications for its 2024 Behavioral Economics Summer Institute. The ten-day Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics, led by David Laibson (Harvard University) and Matthew Rabin (Harvard University), introduces graduate students and early career faculty to the findings and methods of behavioral economics—the application of psychological theory and research to economics. This opportunity is open to Ph.D. students who by July 2024 will have completed at least one year of their program, and faculty and postdocs who earned a Ph.D. since May 2023. The application deadline for the June 29 – July 9 Summer Institute, which will be held at Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts, is March 29, 2024.

The Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship program is open for graduate students to start submitting applications! The Social Entrepreneurship Fellows allows students to explore how best to deploy social enterprise models for innovations that are developed by University of Washington researchers. This is a 10-week program over the summer. Four fellows will be selected from across a variety of disciplines and investigate a range of projects. The projects are focused on finding innovative ways to maintain the balance between financial sustainability and social impact in addition to generating revenue. 

The 2024 Social Networks & Health Methods Workshop (SN&H ’24) will be live and in-person this year from May 14-17 on Duke’s campus in Durham NC and is now accepting applications for SN&H ’24 Fellowships. The NICHD Sponsored Social Networks and Health methods workshop is a week-long workshop aimed at introducing attendees to topics in social network analysis and how they can be applied to research on health and health policy. 

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The Institute for Research on Poverty invites applications from U.S.-based scholars who belong to groups underrepresented in academia to apply for its Visiting Poverty Scholars Program. The Visiting Poverty Scholars Program aims to enhance the research interests and resources available to poverty scholars from underrepresented populations, foster interaction among a diverse set of scholars, and broaden the corps of poverty researchers. 

The UW Moris Women’s Center will host the third seminar of its Financial Empowerment and Literacy Series, co-sponsored by CSDE. The seminar will take place on Wednesday, April 10th from 11:30-1:00 PM in 320 Parrington Hall. Speakers in this series include Rachel McCracken (CFA®, MBA – Team Lead & Wealth Manager), Becky Wilcox (CFA®, MBA, FRM – Wealth Manager), and Larissa Vidal (Wealth Manager). In this third seminar, speakers will discuss what happens after you open investment accounts.

The Paul G Allen Family Foundation is seeking projects that implement Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) in the Pacific Northwest . The foundation will allocate $5 million and anticipates funding up to five rigorous, place-based NCS projects. They encourage projects that are led by, or in partnership with, Indigenous Peoples and local communities. A Letter of Intent (LOI) is due by April 12th and applicants who meet the foundation criteria will be invited to submit a full proposal by May 15th.

Attend the Benjamin Rabinowitz Symposium in Medical Ethics, with its 2024 focus on Race, Health, and Justice. This cross-disciplinary symposium brings together students, faculty, researchers and members of the public to discuss racial disparities in population health and health care, and the broader social, political, economic and historical structures in which they occur. The event will take place on Friday, April 12th from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM in the Walker Ames Room of Kane Hall. Learn more and register here!