This week CSDE Affiliate and Professor of Statistics Jon Wakefield will present his research on measuring the under-five mortality rate (U5MR) in low- and middle-income countries. In this talk, he will describe models that have been developed to produce the official United Nations (UN) subnational U5MR estimates in 22 countries. He will also discuss strategies for dealing with data sparsity and time and space, discrete and continuous spatial models, and a number of other modeling topics.

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

This seminar is co-sponsored with the Population Health Initiative

The Population Association of America has selected Sara Curran and a team of 25 editorial board members to lead the association’s flagship journal, Demography, for the next three years - from May 2022 through April 2025. Curran, CSDE Director, will be joined by an editorial board of UW faculty in Anthropology, Economics, Geography, Public Policy, Sociology, and Statistics, along with an equal number of faculty from Duke University, Emory University, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, National University of Singapore, Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of British Columbia, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Riverside, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Minnesota. Demography has just moved to an open access platform with Duke University Press and this new organization presents good opportunities for further growing the impact of population research more broadly.

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

• Roberto Orellano—Professor, School of Social Work. Dr. Orellana's current work involves some of the most challenging public-health issues of the day including developing culturally tailored training for Latinx social workers who are providing COVID-19 contact tracing and vaccine promotion among Latinx communities in the Pacific Northwest; a national HIV behavioral surveillance project focused on high-risk populations; and an international indigenous health research training program serving Peru, Guatemala, Nepal and Hawaii.
• Emma Riley—Assistant Professor, Economics. Dr. Riley's research has a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and primarily utilizes large-scale randomized field experiments. She has on-going research looking at the impact of digital financial technologies on female enterprises and studying the effects of a village-level poverty alleviation program on household welfare.
• Mienah Sharif—Assistant Professor, Epidemiology. Dr. Sharif takes a social justice, global and intersectional approach towards examining the nature and determinants of health inequities among racial and ethnic minority groups across the lifecourse. She is especially interested in addressing questions about the influence of structural factors, differential exposure to adverse social conditions and psychosocial factors on indicators of health and wellbeing across various life stages.
• LaTonya Trotter—Associate Professor, Department of Bioethics and Humanities. Dr. Trotter is a sociologist of medicine whose scholarship is motivated by three things: an empirical commitment to health care as a site of inquiry; a theoretical commitment to understanding the social processes that reproduce inequality in health care; and a methodological commitment to attending to how those processes are reproduced by interactions within the medical workplace.
• Jevin West—Associate Professor & Director, Information School. Dr. West builds models, algorithms and interactive visualizations for understanding the flow of information in large knowledge networks. Two particular areas of interest are scholarly communication and intellectual property.

This year’s Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Conference, held October 19-21, 2021, focused on “Racism, Power and Justice: Achieving Population Health Equity”. CSDE Trainee Jessica Lapham attended and gave a poster presentation that focused on the intersection of welfare stigma, state contexts and the health of mothers receiving public assistance benefits. The poster (P94) was featured in the Health Equity poster forum.

CSDE Affiliate Amanda Phipps and a team of co-authors published this work in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention. The study was exploring the associations between Fusobacterium nucleatum, tumor characteristics, and colorectal cancer survival. The authors highlight that the subspecies of these bacteria negatively impact mortality of colorectal cancer patients and note that effects are particularly driven during tumor stage shifts.

On Thursday, November 18 at 8pm, CSDE Affiliate Abraham Flaxman will join Dr. Nadav Davidovitch, Professor of Health Systems Management at Ben-Gurion University, to discuss Israel’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can register for the event here.

We want to highlight several outstanding grant opportunities that may be of particular interest to our public health research community:

• Building Malaria Modeling Capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Digital Health Services for Pregnant Women to Support Antenatal Risk Stratification in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Innovations in Eliminating Neglected Tropical Diseases
• Strengthening Data Science Capacity and the Ecosystem: Enable Data-Centered Public Health Interventions
• Metagenomic Next Generation Sequencing to Detect, Identify, and Characterize Pathogens

If CSDE's teams can be of 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 Steve Goodreau with a request for advice (goodreau@uw.edu).