Join us in celebrating the start of the Fall Quarter with CSDE! Catch up with your colleagues, meet new affiliates, staff members, fellows, and trainees, and find out what is new and upcoming at CSDE. Mike Renz CSDE’s program coordinator has organized refreshments. Besides catching up with everyone, you can take home your own seminar series poster!

Where: Between Raitt Hall and Savery Hall
Date: Friday, Sept. 29th, 2023
Time: 12:30-1:30 PM

The CSDE Development Core is happy to announce a Population Research Planning Grant awarded to CSDE Affiliate Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen, Professor in the School of Social Work and a long-time expert on healthy aging among LGBTQ+ adults.

In 2020, Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen worked to establish an international collaboration of researchers in 18 countries across six world regions—from Canada to Japan to Argentina to Nigeria to Pakistan. Collectively, the group piloted online and mail-in surveys about health and life experiences among adult members of sexual and gender minorities in each country.

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

Rachel Prusynski joins CSDE as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Physical Therapy in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington. S. Joseph Shin is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Michelle Shin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing at the University of Washington School of Nursing. 

CSDE Affiliates Nathalie Williams and Sarfraz Khan will be hosting a workshop focused on Migration & Health: Perspectives from South Asia on October 12-13, 2023 on the UW campus (co-sponsored by CSDE and the South Asia Center).

Human migration is a defining issue of our time and is increasingly recognized as a global public health priority. 

CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield, along with co-authors, has published new research in arXiv entitled, “Small Area Estimation with Random Forests and the LASSO”. They consider random forests and LASSO methods for model-based small area estimation when the number of areas with sampled data is a small fraction of the total areas for which estimates are required.

CSDE Alum Colin Baynes and CSDE Affiliate Kenneth Sherr, along with co-authors, has recently published new research in JMIR Publications entitled, “Enhancing the Introduction and Scale Up of Self-Administered Injectable Contraception (DMPA-SC) in Health Systems (the EASIER Project): Protocol for Embedded Implementation Research”. The introduction of self-administered injectable contraception presents an opportunity to address the unmet need for family planning.

CSDE Affiliate Ann Bostrom, along with co-authors, has published new research in the latest edition of the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction entitled, “Where does scientific uncertainty come from, and from whom? Mapping perspectives of natural hazards science advice”. The science associated with assessing natural hazard phenomena and the risks they pose contains many layers of complex and interacting elements, resulting in diverse sources of uncertainty.

CSDE Affiliate Ali Mokdad was recently quoted in a CNN article entitled, “It seems like everyone has Covid-19. Here’s why this wave is probably worse than official data suggests”. Dr. Mokdad’s expertise in population health has helped UW produce regular estimates of Covid-19 case rates and projections for trends from 2020 to 2022, but the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation paused that modeling in December. All of the measures that factored into the model had stopped being reported or had changed in some way.

The 2023 PAA Election results are in! CSDE Affiliate and Executive Committee Member Kyle Crowder was elected to the leadership of the Population Association of America. Dr. Crowder will join as Vice President, working closely with PAA President Irma Elo (U of Penn). Congratulations, Dr. Kyle! Thank you for this important service.

CSDE External Affiliate Claus Pörtner, along with co-authors, has published new research on the “Impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown on healthcare inaccessibility and unaffordability in Uganda” in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.  Several studies have reported adverse consequences of the COVID-19 lockdowns on the utilization of healthcare services across Africa. However, little is known about the channels through which lockdowns impacted healthcare utilization. This study focuses on unaffordability as a reason for not utilizing healthcare services.

A new article published by CSDE Affiliate Karin Frey, and co-authors, in the School Psychology Review discusses how the gratitude youth feel after different types of bystander action may depend on which behaviors are most congruent with personal beliefs. In this study, 264 ethnically diverse adolescents (African, European, Mexican-American, and Indigenous) from the Pacific Northwest described past instances when they experienced an act of peer-instigated aggression and subsequent bystander action.

CSDE Affiliate Michael Spencer was recently quoted in a news article by The Seattle Times entitled, “After devastating Maui fires, let’s center people, not tourism“. Dr. Spencer is a Native Hawaiian (Kānaka ‘Ōiwi) researcher and Professor in the School of  Social Work and Director of Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Oceania Affairs here at UW. This article highlights Dr. Spencer’s findings that focus on health equity among Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) populations.

CSDE External Affiliate Arni Rao recently led research on an article entitled, “Stationary status of discrete and continuous age-structured population models” published in Mathematical Biosciences. This article argues how the partition theorem-based approach provides more up-to-date and timely measures to find the status of the population stationarity of a country better than the NRR-(net reproductive rate) based approach. He questions the timeliness of the value of NRR in deciding the stationary process of the country and proves associated theorems on discrete and continuous age distributions and derive measurable functional properties.

Tina Swenson has recently joined CSDE as our new Administrator, providing grant and fiscal, human resources, and personnel administration. Prior to joining CSDE, she has served as the Administrator for the School of Drama and Dept. of Scandinavian Studies, as well as other roles across campus. Tina holds a BA from the University of Washington and has worked on campus for 16 years. In her personal time, she enjoys hiking, biking, traveling, and fostering rescue dogs.

Training Director Jessica Godwin will be holding a workshop on Tuesday, September 12th on writing extended abstracts for the Population Association of American (PAA) annual conference, which is being held in Columbus, OH next year! Attendees will have the opportunity to have their extended abstract reviewed by a peer and a faculty member, as well as to review one of their peers’ manuscripts.

The East-West Center International Graduate Student Conference (IGSC) is accepting abstracts from current graduate students, as well as from scholars, practitioners, artists, and scientists, who have completed a graduate degree within the past three years. IGSC welcomes abstracts globally and from any discipline related to the US and Asia-Pacific region.

This year’s theme is Elucidating the Periphery: Rethinking Neglected Narratives and Novel Approaches. This student-organized conference provides an opportunity to venture beyond one’s own boundaries to interface with neglected narratives from peripheral perspectives as well as novel techniques in a transdisciplinary context.

The Population Association of America has just opened up its submission portal for papers proposed for the 2024 Annual Meetings. They will welcome your submissions for the PAA 2024 Annual Meeting and look forward to a full and rigorous scientific conference next spring in Columbus, Ohio!

The National Science Foundation’s newest environmental synthesis center, the Environmental Data Innovation and Inclusion Lab at UC Boulder, seeks proposals for interdisciplinary working groups blending diverse forms of environmental and social data to advance basic scientific understanding and enable informed environmental decision and policy making. A description of the ESIIL working group program can be found here, and the request for proposals can be found here.

The Office of Research Central has opened up their submission portal for The Bridge Funding Program, which provides funding to support faculty to span a temporary funding gap in critical research programs. A maximum of $50,000 may be applied for through the Provost. All funding requests must be matched 1:1 by the applicant’s college/school.

The NSF and the NIH have partnered on a call for proposals to advance research in the area of smart health and biomedical research deploying data science and AI tools. The purpose of this interagency program solicitation is to support the development of transformative high-risk, high-reward advances in computer and information science, engineering, mathematics, statistics, behavioral and/or cognitive research to address pressing questions in the biomedical and public health communities.

The NIH is encouraging grant applications to support the evaluation of the utility and validity of digital health and artificial intelligence (AI) tools and technologies in epidemiological, clinical, and intervention research. The intent is to support the addition of new measurement modalities to evaluate existing and recently developed but not yet validated digital health and AI tools such as sensor technologies, smartphone applications, software as a medical device (SaMD), and AI algorithms.

This funding opportunity announcement invites research projects that seek to explain the underlying mechanisms, processes, and trajectories of social relationships and how these factors affect outcomes in human health, illness, recovery, and overall wellbeing. Types of projects submitted under this FOA include studies that prospectively assign human participants to conditions (i.e., experimentally manipulate independent variables) and that assess biomedical and/or behavioral outcomes in humans to understand fundamental aspects of phenomena related to social connectedness and isolation.

CSDE affiliates may be interested to read Dr. Diana Bianchi’s blog post about the impact of climate change events on health. Many of NICHD’s populations of interest are adversely affected by these climate crises. Dr. Bianchi refers to several NICHD funded projects that examine how climate related severe events impact child health and development, as well as maternal and infant child health.