Connor Gilroy and Jessica Godwin Receive CSDE BD2K Fellowships
Posted: 12/6/2016 (CSDE Awards)
Congratulations to Connor Gilroy and Jessica Godwin, the recipients of the CSDE Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Fellowships, funded by CSDE’s NIH T32 institutional Grant!
Connor, a first-year graduate student in the Department of Sociology, has research interests at the intersection of Sociology, Demography and Data Science. As part of his fellowship, Connor will be studying the relationship between online and offline LGBTQ communities. The project is intended to combine online and offline data to understand the impact of the development of online communities on offline behavior. It is an important topic that is tied to the well-being of populations, which is a central research theme at CSDE. Connor’s CSDE Affiliate mentors are Kate Stovel and Emilio Zagheni.
Jessica, a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Statistics, has an MA in Statistics and is interested in statistical problems with applications in demography and the social sciences. As part of her fellowship, Jessica will be studying spatial and temporal variation in health outcomes in a global health setting. She will be combining large amounts of surveyed health data (millions of monthly records in each survey year) with covariate information on a fine spatial gird, and to subsequently smooth with space-time Gaussian process (GP) models. She will also be producing global small area estimates of under-five mortality, addressing statistical issues that inevitably arise when fitting a model to different data, and working on interpreting and synthesizing the findings. This research would bring demography research on small area estimates of health and under five mortality up to the standards of the state of the art in spatial estimation, along with allowing for the inclusion of covariates. Her CSDE Affiliate mentors are Jon Wakefield and Tyler McCormick.