CSDE wishes you a happy spring break! Our first spring seminar will be with Shannon Monnat from Syracuse University on Friday, March 29th from 12:30-1:30 in 360 PAR and on Zoom (register here). Stay tuned for our 2024 seminar schedule!

CSDE Affiliates Laura Dwyer-Lindgren (Health Metrics Sciences, Global Health) and Ali H. Mokdad (Health Metrics Sciences, Epidemiology) released an article in The Lancet Public Health, titled “Burden of liver cancer mortality by county, race, and ethnicity in the USA, 2000–19: a systematic analysis of health disparities“. Understanding how specific populations are affected by liver cancer is important for identifying priorities, policies, and interventions to mitigate health risks and reduce disparities. This study aims to provide comprehensive analysis of rates and trends in liver cancer mortality for different racial and ethnic populations in the USA nationally and at the county level from 2000 to 2019.

CSDE Affiliate Isabelle Cohen (Public Policy & Governance) authored a new study in The World Bank Economic Review, titled “Documenting Decentralization: Empirical Evidence on Administrative Unit Proliferation from Uganda“. Decentralization is an important and commonplace type of reform, yet our understanding of its effects remains limited. This paper documents the effects of the 2009–10 wave of district creation in Uganda, which increased the country’s districts by 42 percent, using rich data on subdistrict units to assess the effects of district creation on a broad range of post-decentralization outcomes in a difference-in-differences framework.

CSDE Affiliate Stipica Mudrazija (Health Systems and Population Health) authored new research with colleagues in the Journal of Aging and Health, titled “Preclinical Dementia and Economic Well-Being Trajectories of Racially Diverse Older Adults“. This study examined the magnitude, changes, and racial/ethnic disparities in the economic costs of the 16-year preclinical phase of dementia—a period of cognitive decline without significant impact on daily activities. The study utilized two dementia algorithms to classify individuals with incident dementia in the Health and Retirement Study. These cases were compared to matched controls in terms of poverty status, labor force participation, and unsecured debts. Older adults classified with dementia were more likely to drop out of the labor force and become poor than similar older adults without dementia. Racial/ethnic disparities in poverty persisted during the preclinical period, with non-Hispanic Black older adults more likely to leave the labor force and Hispanic older adults more likely to have unsecured debt. Findings highlight the economic costs during prodromal phase of dementia, emphasizing need for early interventions to reduce financial strain across diverse older adults.

CSDE Affiliate Joan A. Casey (Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences) co-authored new research in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, titled “Accuracy of self-reported distance to nearest unconventional oil and gas well in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia residents and implications for exposure assessment“. The study was lead-authored by Cassandra J. Clark, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. Self-reported distances to industrial sources have been used in epidemiology as proxies for exposure to environmental hazards and indicators of awareness and perception of sources. Unconventional oil and gas development (UOG) emits pollutants and has been associated with adverse health outcomes. We compared self-reported distance to the nearest UOG well to the geographic information system-calculated distance for 303 Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia residents using Cohen’s Weighted Kappa. Understanding differences between objective and subjective measures of UOG proximity could inform studies of perceived exposures or risks and may also be relevant to adverse health effects.

CSDE Affiliate David Swanson (Sociology, UC Riverside) co-authored new research in Social Science Quarterly, titled “The decline of the non-Hispanic white population in the United States of America“. The question of a declining non-Hispanic white (NHW) population has sparked debate in the United States. In examining this question, three bodies of research have emerged. One group reports that the decline is real, a second argues that it is an illusion, and the third provides evidence that the decline is concentrated within socio-economic segments of the NHW population. Authors use the third groups’ insight as the starting point for their research objective.

CSDE Trainee Natalie Vaughan-Wynn (Geography) and CSDE Affiliate Jin-Kyu Jung (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences) published an article in Environment and Planning F, titled “Digital food apartheid: The uneven food geographies of Seattle in the era of Amazon“. This article puts forward the concept of “digital food apartheid” to articulate differentiation in terms of one’s agency concerning their food that is mediated by, reified through, or materialized from data or digital infrastructure given the omnipresence of racial capitalism. They examine the digitization of public food assistance in the United States in conversation with Black digital geographies, food geographies, and critical GIS, paying particular attention to the US Department of Agriculture’s COVID-19-era Online Grocery Purchase Program (OPP), which gives Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants access to online grocery shopping and delivery.

In spring quarter, CSDE will be hosting a workshop series and several working groups, including the Computational Demography Working Group, the Biomarker Working Group, and the Migrations & Settlement Working Group. 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.

You can find our workshop website and register for our Spring 2024 workshops and working groups in the links below. Stay tuned as we announce the topics of working group meetings throughout the quarter!

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.

Spring Workshop Series

• Introduction to Bayesian Statistics: Likelihoods, Priors, & Posteriors
  • Date & Time: Monday, April 1st @ 9:30AM-11:30AM
  • Location: Raitt HRC 101/Zoom
  • Instructor: Jessica Godwin
• Introduction to Bayesian Statistics: Inference
  • Date & Time: Tuesday, April 9th @ 9:30AM-11:30AM
  • Location: HRC 101/Zoom
  • Instructors: Jessica Godwin
• The NorthwestFederal Statistical Research Data Center: Enabling Access to Confidential, Unpublished Data from theFederal Statistical System
  • Date & Time: Tuesday, April 9th @ 12:30PM-1:30PM
  • Location: Zoom
  • Instructors: Sofia Ayala & Carlos Becerra
• Survey Methods 1: Online Survey Design & Administration with REDCap
  • Date & Time: Mondays April 22nd and 29th @1:30PM-3:30PM
  • Location: Savery 117
  • Location: Matt Dunbar & Paul Litwin
• Agent Based Modeling in R
  • Date & Time: Tuesday, April 23rd @ 10:00AM-11:30AM
  • Location: Zoom
  • Instructors: Deven Hamilton
• Introduction to Actigraphy in Population Research
  • Date & Time: Thursday, April 25th @ 2:00PM-3:30PM
  • Location: Raitt 223/Zoom
  • Instructors: Tiffany Pan & Rob Tennyson

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: TBD
  • Location: TBD
  • Contact: Aryaa Rajouria (rajouria@uw.edu)

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.

The AI2ES and CSDE invite you to the 2024 D4 Hack Week: Disasters, Demography, Disparities and Decisions to be hosted in-person, with a  remote participation option, at the University of Washington (Seattle campus), in September, 2024. This is a hands-on workshop intended to integrate environmental, demographic, health, and other societal impacts data and develop innovative new approaches and tools for analysis. We will provide funding support, including travel, lodging, and related expenses. Space will be limited.

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.

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 National Institute for Aging will be hosting a virtual workshop from March 26-27th. Around the world, we are seeing an increase in the frequency and intensity of weather-related events and disasters. Individuals who are vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather, especially older adults, are experiencing worsening health outcomes, such as cardiovascular and respiratory disease, as well as excess mortality. This workshop is situated within the context of an increasingly urgent need to examine the exposures, vulnerabilities, and impacts faced by older adults, and the behavioral and social pathways through which health outcomes and disparities are impacted by climate events. Read more in the event flyer and register on Zoom here.

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 Population Health Initiative is offering Tier 1 and Tier 2 Pilot research grants, with Letters of Intent (LOI) due in April of 2024. Tier 1 grants are meant to support researchers in laying the foundation for a future project to generate proof-of-concept. Tier 3 grants aim to support faculty and PI-eligible staff to create follow-on opportunities for impactful projects that have developed preliminary data or realized proof-of-concept and are seeking to scale their efforts and/or expand the scope of their work.

As the National Research Center on Poverty and Economic Mobility, the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison invites applications from continuing Ph.D. and master’s degree students who are from groups that are underrepresented in academia for its 2024–2025 Professional Development Training Series on Poverty and Economic Mobility Research. IRP is offering this virtual quarterly training series from fall 2024 through spring 2025 to 10 students. The training is virtual and will take place from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025.

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 next lunch-and-learn session for the Center for Disaster Resilient Communities will occur on Wednesday, April 3, 2024, from 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. in the Hans Rosling Center for Population Health and via Zoom. Lunch will be offered for in-person attendees. This event will feature Dr. Judith Mitrani-Reiser, Senior Research Scientist in the Materials and Structural Systems Division (Engineering Laboratory) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Dr. Mitrani-Reiser’s presentation will be, “Taking Measure: How Earthquake Reconnaissance Has Evolved Over Fifty Years.” Please see the flyer for more details and a registration link.

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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.