• When:  Friday, May 10, 2024 (12:30-1:30 PM)
• Where:  360 PAR and Virtual (register here)
• Sign up for 1x1 meetings here

CSDE invites you to a seminar with Patricia Homan on Friday, May 10th from 12:30-1:30 PM in 360 PAR and on Zoom (register here). This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. Patricia (Trish) Homan is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Public Health Program at Florida State University. She is also an associate of FSU’s Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy and the Center for Demography and Population Health. Dr. Homan will be available for 1x1 meetings throughout the day (sign up here). 

Abstract: Emerging lines of research have begun to quantify various forms of structural oppression and examine their impacts on population health. In this talk, Dr. Homan will: 1) provide an overview of current conceptualization and measurement of structural sexism, structural racism, and other forms of structural oppression, 2) present new evidence on how structural sexism shapes life expectancy in the US (from analyses using hazard modeling and multistate lifetables), 3) illustrate how structural sexism and racism are associated with rates of inter-state migration, 4) discuss how demographers can build on this work in future research.

CSDE Affiliate Joan Casey (Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences) co-authored an article in Current Environmental Health Reports, entitled “The Environment and Headache: a Narrative Review“. In this narrative review, authors summarize the peer-reviewed literature published between 2017 and 2022 that evaluated ambient environmental risk factors for primary headache disorders, which affect more than half of the population globally. Primary headache disorders include migraine, tension-type headache (TTH), and trigeminal and autonomic cephalalgias (TAC).

CSDE Affiliates Jane M. Simoni (Psychology) and Susan M. Graham (Medicine and Global Health) released research with colleagues in BMC Infectious Diseases, entitled “Key informant views on potential acceptability and feasibility of long-acting antiretroviral treatment for HIV in Kenya“. In 2020, 14% of diagnosed persons living with HIV (PLWH) in Kenya were not taking antiretroviral therapy (ART), and 19% of those on ART had unsuppressed viral loads. Long-acting antiretroviral therapy (LA-ART) may increase viral suppression by promoting ART uptake and adherence. Authors conducted key informant (KI) interviews with HIV experts in Kenya to identify product and delivery attributes related to the acceptability and feasibility of providing LA-ART to PLWH in Kenya.

CSDE Affiliate Melissa L. Martinson (Social Work) released an article with co-authors in SSM – Population Health, entitled “Gradients in low birthweight by maternal education: a comparative perspective“. Longstanding research has shown strong inequalities in low birthweight by household income. However, most such research has focused on Anglophone countries, while evidence emerging from other developed countries suggest a stronger role of education rather than incomes in creating inequalities at birth. This paper compares gradients in low birthweight by maternal education, as well as explores underlying mechanisms contributing to these gradients, in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Using decomposition analysis we found that while inequalities in low birth weight across maternal education groups were relatively similar in the United States, the United Kingdom and France, the individual-level mechanisms producing such inequalities varied substantially across the three countries, with income being most important in the US, pregnancy smoking being most evident in France, and the UK occupying an intermediate position. Essentially, maternal education appears to produce inequalities in low birth weight in the US through income differences, but this is not the case in the other countries examined.

CSDE Affiliate Jing Xu (Anthropology) co-authored an article in Scientific Reports, entitled “Modeling children’s moral development in postwar Taiwan through naturalistic observations preserved in historical texts“. A core issue in the interdisciplinary study of human morality is its ontogeny in diverse cultures, but systematic, naturalistic data in specific cultural contexts are rare to find. This study conducts a novel analysis of 213 children’s socio-moral behavior in a historical, non-Western, rural setting, based on a unique dataset of naturalistic observations from the first field research on Han Chinese children.

In spring quarter, CSDE will be hosting a workshop series and several working groups. Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome to register and we welcome registrants from outside the University of Washington for our remote workshops as well.

Please reach out to CSDE’s Training Director, Jessica Godwin (jlg0003@uw.edu), if you have additional workshops you would like to see offered in the future and we will do our best to accommodate those requests. View the schedule as a pdf here.

CSDE Workshops

No remaining workshops this quarter.

CSDE Working Groups

• Computational Demography Working Group
  • Date: Wednesdays @ 9AM-10AM
  • Location: Raitt 223/Zoom
  • Contact: June Yang (jyang32@uw.edu) and Ihsan Kahveci (ikahveci@uw.edu)
• Biomarker Working Group
  • Date: 1st Thursdaysof each month (4/4, 5/2, 6/6) @ 12:30PM-1:30PM
  • Location: Raitt 223
  • Contact: Tiffany Pan (tpan@uw.edu)
• Migration & Settlements Working Group
  • Date: Every other Friday @ 9:00AM starting March 29th
  • Location: Raitt 114/Zoom (meeting link)
  • Contact: Aryaa Rajouria (rajouria@uw.edu)

At a recent meeting, Rebecca Clark, chief of the Population Dynamics Bureau (PDB) at NICHD, provided useful insights on how researchers developing new proposals should contact officials at NIH. Her remarks were focused on PDB at NICHD, but the advice seems broadly generalizable to other institutes as well. She states: If you have specific aims, please send them to just one PDB Program Officers in one email. (NB: Do not send separate emails to each program officer within a branch, since they all confer and collaborate on any incoming inquiries.)

All potential applicants, including those who have prepared specific aims, should send responses to the following items and attach to the email inquiry:

On Wednesday 5/08 from 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM, CDWG will host June Yang to present her research. June Yang is a Ph.D. candidate at UW’s Department of Sociology, a CSDE T32 fellow in Demography and Data Science, and recently joined UW CSDE and eScience Institute as a research scientist. Her current research projects include 1) using social media text data to study attitudes around alternative forms of union formation and childbearing choices, and 2) using complex survey data to study the homeless population in King County, WA. The event will occur in 223 Raitt (the Demography Lab) and on Zoom (register here). Learn more about the talk in the full story.

Applications are now open for this program, which assists scholars in preparing applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). More info here, and application page here. Past participants report great success, and lots of support and even fun along the way. Applying to the GWSP is open to CSDE affiliates (UW and external) as well as to local post-docs writing K awards with one or more CSDE affiliates on their mentoring team.

On 5/15 from 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM, CDWG will host Jiahui Xu to present her research. Jiahui Xu is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests lie in social inequality, quantitative methodology, and computational sociology. Her actively ongoing projects include: 1). adapting the generalized random forests for causal decomposition to investigate college returns; 2). combining machine learning and causal inference methods to decompose health disparities; 3). applying natural language processing models to autocode occupational text data. The event will occur in 223 Raitt (the Demography Lab) and on Zoom (register here). Learn more about the talk in the full story.

On Wednesday, May 22nd from 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM, CDWG will host Dr. Aja Sutton to introduce her research. Dr. Aja Sutton is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Social Sciences Division at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford University. She received her PhD from the Department of Geography at the University of Washington (UW). From 2020-2022 she was TADA-BSSR NIH T32 Fellow in Data Science and Demography Training at UW's Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, from which she also holds a Certificate in Demographic Methods. She received an MA in History from Western University, and an MSc in Palaeopathology from Durham University. Her work is focused on population health, computational social science, and epidemiology. The event will take place in 223 Raitt and on Zoom (register here).

On May 29th from 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM, Dr. Risto Conte Keivabu will join CDWG to present his research. Dr. Risto Conte Keivabu is a postdoc in the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography of Emilio Zagheni at the Max Planck Institute of Demographic Research in Rostock (Germany). His research interests are in climate change, socio-demographic inequalities and demography. More precisely, in his work he tries to understand the population consequences of climate change and environmental exposures. The event will take place in 223 Raitt (the Demography Lab) and on Zoom (register here). Learn more in the full story!

We are pleased to announce the first Call for Letters of Interest (LOI) for a training opportunity at the Washington Learning Health System Embedded Scientist Training and Research (LHS E-STAR) Center. The Center collaborates closely with four federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) and provides mentored LHS training to scholars embedded within these primary care organizations. This first round will consist of two scholar positions working with Community Health of Central Washington and NeighborCare Health. Subsequent scholars will conduct projects in primary care at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, Kaiser Permanente Washington, Community Health Association of Spokane, and HealthPoint. Learn more about the E-STAR Center on our website. An informational webinar on the LOI and application process will be held on May 14, 2024 from 10:30AM-12:00 PM, register here. All LOI materials will be due on May 29, 2024.  

This workshop on November 5 to 6, 2024 at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, clarifies the goals, techniques, and applications of machine learning methods for population research. The main focus of this workshop is on ML techniques using quantitative population data and research questions, not on ML language models. The workshop consists of keynotes, contributed sessions, and a tutorial. Learn more here and apply by May 15th. A pdf version of the call is also available here.

JSDE (Joint Seminar in Development Economics) is excited to host Matt Lowe on May 20th from 11:00-12:30 in 410 Savery. Lowe is an assistant professor of economics at the University of British Columbia. More details on this talk to come!

Join CSSS for a seminar with Jason R. Williams on Wednesday, May 22nd from 12:30-1:30 PM in 409 Savery and on Zoom (register here). Dr. Williams is a research scientist at the Addictions, Drug & Alcohol Institute at the University of Washington School of Medicine. At ADAI, he works on tracking trends in problematic drug use, analysis of survey data, and evaluations using both primary and secondary data. He received his PhD from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance in 2013 with assistance from CSSS and the West Coast Poverty Center.

The Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center (NW CASC) invites Statements of Interest for their Federal Fiscal Year 2025 research portfolio, for which they are seeking projects that focus on developing knowledge and resources to address 1) the effectiveness of management or adaptation strategies, 2) climate adaptation strategies for estuaries and coastal ecosystems and 3) management and climate adaptation strategies for sagebrush and juniper ecosystems, with a focus on the Great Basin. Statements of interest are due May 23rd,

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research invites submissions from researchers working on or interested in scholarly migration and mobility to attend a one-day symposium in Rostock on October 15, 2024. The symposium aims to promote lively exchange and collaboration among a group of interdisciplinary scientists with interests related to scholarly migration and scientific mobility. Read more here and apply by May 25th.

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.