CSDE Welcomes 3 New Research Affiliates

Posted: 7/10/2025 (CSDE Research)

CSDE is pleased to introduce three of our new UW Research Affiliates! Jessica Acolin (Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) focuses her work on understanding how systemic, social, and environmental factors shape mental and behavioral health outcomes, with a particular interest in climate change impacts on youth and young adults. Kamryn Morris’s (Assistant Professor, School of Social Work) research seeks to promote thriving among Black youth through supporting school belonging and improving school climate. Yanfang Su’s (Assistant Professor, Global Health) research focuses on three areas: 1) economic evaluation of healthcare systems, including analysis of equity, supply, demand, costs, and quality; 2) public policy evaluation; and 3) global health and population measures. Learn more about each affiliate in the full story!

Jessica Acolin – Jessica Acolin’s work centers on understanding how systemic, social, and environmental factors shape mental and behavioral health outcomes, with a particular interest in climate change impacts on youth and young adults. Dr. Acolin holds a PhD in Public Health (Health Services), postdoctoral training in psychiatry, and has over a decade of professional experience in mental health research and practice. She holds advanced expertise in quantitative epidemiologic methods appropriate for population health research (e.g., geospatial data analysis, multilevel models) and is developing skills in qualitative and mixed methods. Further, she strongly values interdisciplinary collaborations and is actively engaged with social scientists, clinicians, and climate scientists, among others. Her practice-oriented partnerships with local health jurisdictions are motivated by her commitment to ensuring her research results in real-world impact. She has 13 peer-reviewed manuscripts published or under review (7 first author), including in leading journals such as Social Science & Medicine and Prevention Science. Her current research focuses on climate change as an environmental stressor. To date, this work has resulted in 6 conference presentations (2 additional under review), 1 research manuscript under peer review, and 2 research manuscripts in preparation. She has served as Principal Investigator on multiple projects and has secured competitive funding, with over $70,000 awarded to date. She has experience with statistical methods appropriate for hierarchical or longitudinal data. She has worked with geocoded data, merged multi-level datasets, utilized generalized linear models, mixture models, and time-varying effects models, and Monte Carlo simulation models.
Kamryn Morris – Kamryn S. Morris (she/her) is an Assistant Professor with the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. Dr. Morris earned her Ph.D. in Family and Human Development, where she was a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) T32 Predoctoral Fellow with training in prevention, dissemination, and implementation science. Her research seeks to promote thriving among Black youth through supporting school belonging and improving school climate. Using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, her program of research examines social (e.g., teacher-student relationships) and contextual (e.g., school racial segregation) factors that promote and/or prohibit Black youths’ development of school belonging and subsequent wellbeing. As part of this research, she learns from and amplifies the voices of educators and Black youth to cultivate pathways towards mitigating the pervasive effects of racism (e.g., interpersonal, structural) in schools and communities.
Yanfang Su – Dr. Yanfang Su is a health economist with more than ten years of work experience in health systems and policy. Dr. Su holds an ScD in Global Health and Population within Health Systems track from Harvard University. During her postdoctoral training at the University of Washington, Dr. Su applied econometric methods to health financing and published papers in The Lancet as co-first author and The Lancet Infectious Diseases as first author. Her publications focus on three areas: 1) economic evaluation of healthcare systems, including analysis of equity, supply, demand, costs, and quality; 2) public policy evaluation; and 3) global health and population measures. Dr. Su has been designing a new course on Comparative Health Systems and mentoring 20 trainees, including 18 from underrepresented groups. Dr. Su is the founder and Board Chair of a non-profit organization, the East West Alliance for Education and Health, which delivered equitable community services and conducted digital health randomized controlled trials in low-resource settings. Dr. Su worked at Tsinghua University and the Hong Kong Policy and Research Institute in China. Dr. Su has consulted for the World Bank, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Results for Development on primary health care systems strengthening. Dr. Su is a guest editor for a special issue on policy implementation science in Frontiers in Health Services. Dr. Su is an IS-2 scholar and her career goal is to become a leading scientist in policy implementation, with a focus on cardiovascular disease prevention.