Archives: Affiliates

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.

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.

Mark Henderson’s research focuses on environmental and social policy issues in the United States and China, often employing spatial analysis methods using Geographic Information Systems. Based on Northeastern’s Oakland, California campus, he has supervised over 200 student projects with local governments and community organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Professor Henderson has a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs (75%) and Mills College at Northeastern University (25%).

Bethany Gordon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington. She specializes in applications of behavioral science and psychology to improve design processes for a more equitable built environment. Her research also focuses on climate justice and addressing designer positionality (i.e., framing assumptions, stakeholder perspective-taking) in large-scale infrastructure design.

Designers’ perceptions of the world shape the decisions they make and, in turn, the decisions they make determine how the next generation perceives the world. This is problematic in a system where designers profess objectivity, but in reality, are subject to prejudice and bias like everyone else. Dr. Gordon’s goal is to find ways to disrupt these behavioral systems by uncovering the biases that most affect designers’ ability to create in ways that align with equity and climate justice. As an interdisciplinary researcher, working across subdisciplines of civil engineering and behavioral science, she aims to increase knowledge about how individuals or teams: 1) conceptualize collective identities in increasingly diverse spaces, 2) can overcome the environmental cues that restrict inclinations for equitable and resilient decision-making, and 3), can leverage climate adaptation to remediate past harms enacted by the built environment.

Spencer Wood is a Research Scientist and Data Science Fellow with the eScience Institute. He is also an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, the Director of the UW Outdoor Recreation & Data Lab, a Senior Fellow with the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University, and a UW Nature & Health Steering Committee member.

Spencer is an interdisciplinary scientist with broad interests and experience in ecology, sustainability, computer science, statistics, and economics. His research and publications have addressed a variety of topics including outdoor recreation, public land management, fire ecology, archaeology, and sustainable development. Since 2020, Web of Science has named Spencer one of the most highly cited researchers of the past decade, placing him in the top 1% of scientists globally.

Spencer’s expertise lies in using data, technology, and quantitative methods to improve policy and management decisions. His work is driven by real-world applications and co-developed through partnerships with non-profits, governments, and corporations who put data science into practice. At eScience, Spencer brings this experience to the mentoring of rising data scientists in the Winter Incubator and the Data Science for Social Good programs.

Before joining the University of Washington, Spencer received his PhD from the University of British Columbia and his postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

Kyu Lee, PhD, is a decision scientist and her research focuses on using disease simulation models to leverage scarce data in forecasting the future burden of disease and in evaluating the value of innovative health technology in many contexts including low- and middle-income countries. Her past research investigated the temporal trend in heavy drinking behaviors and features of Hepatitis C virus epidemiology observed in China. Her recent research project examined the impact of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions on the population immunity and future flu epidemics in the United States. Dr.Lee currently develops projects on estimating the impact of new vaccine technologies (e.g. cell-based, recombinant, and mRNA vaccines) on the future burden of respiratory infectious diseases such as flu and RSV, using mathematical models.

Dr. Kris Ma is an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at University of Washington, Seattle. She studies primary care and behavioral health integration, health service disparities, dementia caregiving, Asian American mental health and cultural adaptations. The overall goal of her research is to improve equitable access and delivery of high-quality behavioral health and aging services in primary care, with an emphasis on racially and ethnically minoritized populations. As an Asian woman and immigrant, she has witnessed firsthand the harms caused by significant service gaps for marginalized individuals. Therefore, she is committed to using knowledge and science to build better systems of care that meet the needs of diverse and marginalized populations. She has two main lines of research. Her first line of research is the integration of behavioral health services in primary care, with the goal of increasing patient access to evidence-based interventions that are effective in the treatment of mental health, substance use, and medical conditions. She studies workforce, payment, and cultural barriers to integrating behavioral health in primary care. Her second line of research is health disparities in older adults of color, including multilingual Asian American immigrants. Using community engagement strategies, she examines the systemic, cultural, and linguistic barriers to care and design culturally responsive interventions to improve the management of chronic diseases, behavioral health, and dementia in Asian Americans.

Dr. Michele Cadigan’s work utilizes mixed methodologies to examine intersectional inequality at the intersection of the criminal legal system and economic markets, with a primary focus on
cannabis legalization and a secondary focus on monetary sanctions. Specifically, she explores how laws and practices in economic markets and the criminal legal system intersect to construct racial
meaning and shape inequality at both macro- and meso-levels. Her work has been published in The Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Russell Sage Foundation: RSF Journal for the Social Sciences, and the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. Additionally, her work has been supported by national funding organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy Research.