CSDE Welcomes Former T32 Trainees & Fellows Back as External Affiliates

Posted: 10/24/2024 ()

CSDE is pleased to welcome back some of our former T32 trainees and fellows as External Research Affiliates! Elizabeth Pelletier’s research is motivated by her interest in how policy shapes economic instability, inequality, and wellbeing. (Census Bureau Economist, Income Statistics Branch). Callie Freitag (Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison) focuses on social policies related to aging, disability, and poverty in the United States. Ian Kennedy’s (Assistant Professor, University of Illinois) work aims to contribute to understandings of how contemporary racism, sexism, and transphobia works, in both visible and less visible ways. Learn more about each affiliate below.

Elizabeth Pelletier – Elizabeth Pelletier is a Census Bureau Economist in the Income Statistics Branch. She recently graduated with her PhD from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. Her research is motivated by her interest in how policy shapes economic instability, inequality, and wellbeing. Her dissertation focuses on paid leave policies, and specifically how they affect employment and economic wellbeing among parents of newborns. Much of her work uses large administrative microdata, and some projects specifically explore how tools from data science and computational demography can be used to make these records more useful to social scientists. Prior to starting at UW, She was a researcher at the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., where she used data on state criminal justice systems to inform policy debates about mass incarceration and justice reform. Before that, she researched education funding in Canadian provinces as a Fulbright grantee at the University of Toronto. She also has a B.A. in Public Policy and Film Studies from the College of William & Mary and a M.S. in Public Policy and Management from the University of Washington.
Callie Freitag – Callie Freitag is a mixed-methods policy researcher and demographer. Her work focuses on social policies related to aging, disability, and poverty in the United States. She has a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management from the University of Washington, where she also earned Graduate Certificates in Disability Studies and Demographic Methods.
Ian Kennedy – Ian Kennedy is a computational social scientist trained working at the intersection of race, digital platforms, and text analysis. Their work aims to contribute to understandings of how contemporary racism, sexism, and transphobia works, in both visible and less visible ways. This means looking for data in new places, like in Craigslist rental ad texts, by developing new uses for large-scale administrative data, or curating large samples of twitter data linked to election misinformation, or through analysis of millions of reddit comments. They are committed to producing useful work beyond scholarly publications, working with groups like the Northwest Justice Project to identify illegal Craigslist ads or with the Election Integrity Partnership to monitor misinformation during the 2020 election.