Qiuju Guo is an Associate Professor in the School of Sociology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, joining the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) at the University of Washington as a visiting scholar for a one-year stay.
Dedicated to gerontological research, Dr. Guo’s core research interests include family and old-age support, aging health and well-being, and older migrants. She has published a series of peer-reviewed papers in both Chinese and English on sociological issues related to older adults. Currently, she is leading a research project on the impacts of intergenerational transmission and feedback on urban adaptation among rural older migrants, exploring social issues concerning aging migration and intergenerational relations.
During her visit to CSDE, Dr. Guo aims to conduct in-depth academic exchanges and collaborative research in demography and aging studies. Colleagues and students are warmly welcome to visit her at Office 218F for discussions on any topics of mutual interest.
Asia Bishop (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is a transdisciplinary scholar whose research draws on social determinants of health, critical, and ecological frameworks to examine how institutional systems, policy environments, and social contexts shape patterned disparities across populations. To date, her work has focused on population-level inequities affecting multiply marginalized youth and adults impacted by the criminal legal system, gang-involved youth, and rural adolescents. She employs diverse methodological approaches, including quantitative analyses of population-based and administrative data, mixed-methods and qualitative inquiry, and applied program evaluation conducted in partnership with public agencies and community organizations. Her work advances population science by examining how structural conditions shape health disparities, service access, and equity, and by generating practice-relevant evidence to inform policy reform and community-centered responses. She received her PhD in Social Welfare, with a statistics concentration through the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, and her MSW in Policy Practice from the University of Washington. Prior to receiving her PhD, she conducted research focused on juvenile legal system reform and the evaluation of novel programs designed to address the complex needs of youth in contact with the juvenile legal system in Washington State.
Dr. Dougherty is a nationally and internationally recognized expert on recovery of physical functioning, psychological adjustment, and quality of life in persons who have suffered sudden cardiac arrest and have received an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD). She has conducted trailblazing research in exercise after an ICD, caregiver interventions after ICD implantation, and goals of care communication in advanced heart failure. Dr. Dougherty is a rare nurse scientist who bridges what is too often a chiasm between nursing research and nursing practice. Dr. Dougherty leads a large interdisciplinary research team, building a program of research that began by systematically characterizing the experiences of those who survived cardiac arrest in Seattle, WA, the home of pioneering work in resuscitation science. The impact of her work is evident in more than 100 publications and an excess of $20 million in research funding. Dr. Dougherty’s current funded research is to test an intervention to prevent the development of PTSD after an ICD shock and to translate exercise interventions into routine clinical practice for persons who have an ICD.
Dr. Dougherty received a BSN from the University of Nebraska, a MA from the University of Iowa, and a PhD from the University of Washington. She completed post-doctoral training at the University of Washington and the Centers for Disease Control and the University of South Carolina. She is certified as an advanced registered nurse practitioner in Adult Health and Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing. She is a Fellow of the American Heart Association Council on Cardiovascular Nursing and the American Academy of Nursing. Dr. Dougherty is the Past Chair of the Council on CV and Stroke Nursing at the American Heart Association.
María is currently a Lecturer at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), teaching statistics and methods. She graduated from the University of Washington with a PhD in Sociology. She holds an M.A. in Sociology from UW, and a BA in Sociology from UNAM. She was an affiliate doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research at the International Max Planck School for Population, Health and Data Science. María’s research explores the intersection of demographic processes and institutional contexts. Her dissertation explores the variations in deportation risk across different individual characteristics and temporal contexts in the United States. She has done research in international migration, migration and health, ethnoracial health disparities, and ethnic identity in Latin America.
Dr. Jeffrey Wall specializes in innovating and adapting methods and theories which bring the environmental and plant values of distinct cultures and traditions into meaningful conversation with each other. He has conducted impactful research on threatened culturally significant landscapes in numerous countries in the Near East, Central Asia and North America. A major threat to such cultural landscapes is rural exodus, a widespread demographic trend which is the focus of his E.U.-Sponsored research program, “Homeland No More: Seeking the Biocultural Origins of Rural Exodus in the Mediterranean Basin.”
Max H. McDonald is a Research Data Analyst at the California Department of Health Care Services, where he conducts applied demographic and economic analysis to support Medi-Cal enrollment and expenditure forecasting. He holds a Master of Public Administration and a Graduate Certificate in Demographic Research Methods from the University of Washington and is currently an MBA student at UC Berkeley Haas. His research interests focus broadly on applied demography and public economics, with particular attention to social insurance programs, population health, and fiscal forecasting. He is especially interested in how demographic change and policy design shape enrollment dynamics and public expenditures. Current and recent work examines policy-driven enrollment trends in Medicaid and the relationship between demographic change, climate-related shocks, and public health expenditures.
Matthew (Matt) Alexander Randolph is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. After graduating with a BA in History and Spanish at Amherst College, Matt received MA and PhD degrees in History from Stanford University, where he served as a graduate fellow for the Department of African & African American Studies and traveled to France as an exchange student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Building on his dissertation (Harboring Freedom: African American Migration and Imperial Rivalries in Samaná Bay, 1822-1871), Matt is writing his first book on the transplantation and transformation of Black identity that took place as part of nineteenth-century Haitian emigration initiatives. In the pursuit of citizenship and prosperity otherwise unimaginable in the antebellum United States, African American migrants relocated to Haiti and (re)created a sense of home as stewards of the land and water of the Samaná peninsula (in what is now the Dominican Republic). This research engages with and contributes to several fields and discourses, including Black Geographies/Ecologies, Caribbean Studies, Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Afrofuturism.
In addition, Matt has ongoing interests in the crossroads of race and nation during Parisian world’s fairs; the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power movements; human rights history; and the global travels of Frederick Douglass. Matt’s scholarship has been supported by a 2022 Fulbright grant for the Dominican Republic, which complemented travel to archives across the United States, France, and Spain. He has presented his research beyond the United States at conferences in several countries, including the Dominican Republic, Martinique, and Senegal. In 2025, he received the Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize from AAIHS (African American Intellectual History Society) for his conference paper, “Migrating Mariners: African American Emigration, Maritime Poetics, and the Afterlives of Slavery on Caribbean Shores.”
Keshet Ronen, PhD MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Health and Director of the MPH program in Global Health. Keshet is interested in development and evaluation of interventions to promote health equity in underserved and marginalized populations globally. Her ongoing work is based in Kenya and the US, and her research employs methods from epidemiology, implementation science, and participatory design. She is interested in perinatal health, mental health, lay service delivery, and digital health. Keshet is passionate about social justice, mentoring, and supporting communities’ leadership in developing strategies to improve their own health.
Jane Dai (she/her) is a public scholar who draws from multiple disciplines to understand how food systems—shaped by policy, systems, and environments—structure the environments where communities pursue health and well-being. She strives to approach research with a storytelling lens by applying mixed methods to an expansive definition of “data” that includes numbers, narratives, maps, and media. Her work and practice at the intersection of public health, urban planning, and public policy aims to leverage her role as a researcher to translate data and evaluation into equitable, affirming, and liberative strategies for community flourishing.
Jane’s research has focused on exploring structural influences on food systems and population health. She is particularly interested in how gentrification—alongside other processes related to uneven community development—influences where, when, and how people access food in urban and suburban contexts. She continues to work with colleagues at the University of Washington to monitor economic determinants of food security, which supports the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s ability to mobilize funds for hunger relief. She serves as the Food Service Guidelines Work Group Fellow within the Nutrition and Obesity Policy and Evaluation Network. Other longtime interests also include commercial determinants of health, food decision-making contexts, and big data for public health nutrition.
As a full-time human, Jane also enjoys spending her time outside or doing “analog” activities. You can find her dog-spotting on runs, drinking tea and reading, tinkering with sourdough pastries, puzzling, or convincing the neighborhood cat to accept chin scritches.
José Alavez’s research brings together critical cartography, digital humanities, pluriversal design principles, and Global South approaches to transnationalism, exile, and diaspora. He focuses on co-creating collaborative and creative mapping practices and representations that reveal the ongoing and multiscalar geographies of migration across the Americas.
Prior to joining the University of Washington, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s (UIUC) Healthy Regions and Policies Lab (HEROP), where he co-led the development of a community-focused data visualization toolkit on social determinants of health grounded in human-centered design and design justice principles. His postdoctoral work also included co-creating workshops alongside community and grassroots organizations to co-design ChiVes, a dashboard for environmental justice in Chicago. Additionally, he co-produced in-depth interviews for the U.S. COVID Atlas as a means to humanize and complement its quantitative data.
José holds a Ph.D. from Concordia University’s (Montreal) Geography, Planning, and Environment Department. For his doctoral dissertation, he employed deep mapping methodologies to study the stories of individuals who endured the death of a loved one in the context of migration. His work illustrated how deep maps, through multiple analytical and artistic displays, reveal that death in the context of migration is not the end of a story, but the beginning and extension of many others. He also holds a Master’s degree in Geomatics from CONACYT’s Research Center of Geospatial Information and a BA in Human Geography from the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City.