The upcoming winter quarter series will launch with a talk from UW Geography Professor Mia Bennett about her research concerning development in the Arctic. You can register for this seminar HERE and find more details about the upcoming winter quarter series on our seminar series page.

Given the uncertainty with the spread of the Omicron variant, our seminar series will continue to be entirely online via Zoom and YouTube. 

Congratulations to all our poster presenters for their very good work! Extra kudos to CSDE Trainee Elizabeth Pelletier (Doctoral Candidate, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance) for winning the best poster award during CSDE's Autumn 2021 Lightning Talks & Poster Session. Pelletier's presentation, titled "Neighborhood Racial Composition and Police Use of Force in Seattle," included geospatial analysis of 911-call data to capture the frequency of policy use of force across the city. Many thanks to our other speakers, Elizabeth Nova (Sociology), Aja Sutton (Geography), and Ellyn Terry (Public Policy), our Interim Training Director Jessica Godwin, and our student coordinator Courtney Allen, for another great CSDE Lightning Talks & Poster Session. Finally, we want to thank everyone who attended and, especially, our wonderful CSDE Faculty Affiliates Panel of poster judges: Peter Catron, Laura Dwyer-Lindgren, Jerry Herting, and Marieka Klawitter.

As Autumn quarter comes to a close, we want to send out an extra word of thanks for all the presenters and participants in our Seminar Series over these past few months. We've enjoyed the valuable insights from your presentations and the thoughtful discussions which always seem to follow. Attendees, thanks for your continued virtual presence and consistently high-caliber questions. Special thanks to our fearless faculty leader, Peter Catron, who organized these sessions!

If you missed any of the seminars from this past quarter and are looking for something to binge over the winter break, all the sessions are openly available on our YouTube channel.

NICHD has officially announced the winners of the Decoding Maternal Morbidity Challenge. Postdoctoral Scholar Monica Keith and CSDE Affiliate and co-Director of the CSDE Biodemography Lab Melanie Martin won one of seven prizes for $50,000, plus they won an additional $10,000 for addressing health disparities. Thank you to all of those who provided good feedback and advice to them! Monica and Melanie also received $5,000 from CSDE for submitting their proposal and they received administrative help in accessing the data through a DUA submitted through OSP to NICHD. Their project title explains it all: "Structural Equation Model Identifies Causal Pathways Between Social Determinants of Maternal Health, Biomarkers of Allostatic Load, and Hypertensive Disorders of Pregnancy Among U.S. Racial Groups."

CSDE Affiliate Brad Wagenaar has recently published two new articles with a number of co-authors. The first paper, published in Cureus, leverages time-series analysis to explore the use of Emergency Medical Services during the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. The authors report trends in call volume and discuss implications regarding the role of EMS during the outbreak. The second article, published in Evidence-Based Mental Health, presents a model-based threshold cost-benefit assessment of a task-sharing treatment approach for mental health disorders.

CSDE Affiliate Nathalie Williams along with a number of co-authors published a new study on how variation in context mediates the effects of social capital on migration. The authors argue that destinations for which migration is logistically difficult to arrange give rise to brokerage industries and hypothesize that brokers, in turn, substitute for the informational capital typically provided by social networks. Their results suggest that migration research should consider the growing role of brokerage agencies.

CSDE Affiliate Emily Williams with several co-authors recently released an article in Addiction Science and Clinical Practice. The paper describes the risks associated with poppy seed tea and its association with opioid use disorder. In this case, the authors treat an individual with opioid use disorder by administering buprenorphine, and characterize the success of that treatment.

Jill Fulmore is the new Training Program Coordinator and Advisor supporting the certificate students working towards the completion of the Certificate in Demographic Methods. Jill will also provide support to the T32 and Shanahan Fellows. She graduated from the UW with a BA in Philosophy and Communications. She has worked for the UW for over 25 years in the advising and administrative capacity. Outside of work, Jill enjoys traveling with her husband and adult children (sunny locations with a beach are best), running, and spending time with friends. Welcome to the CSDE team, Jill!