Archives: Affiliates

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.

 

• Here’s a link to my publication with Professor Neil Koblitz (UW Math): One Bad Formula Can Spoil Everything: A Simple Adjustment That Would Improve the UN’s Gender Inequality Index

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.

Hyungmin (Min) Cha is a demographer and medical sociologist whose research investigates how socioeconomic resources and family ties shape health inequalities across the life course. His work centers on dementia, caregiving, and aging, with a particular focus on how social and economic disadvantages accumulate and are reproduced across generations. His research has appeared in leading journals such as Demography, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science & Medicine, and Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences, among others. He also pursues global comparative studies using harmonized international data to examine how contextual differences influence aging and cognitive health.

Raheem’s research focuses on how public policy and political institutions can expand access to opportunity for all individuals, particularly those from disadvantaged and historically marginalized communities. Most of his current research examines the impacts of social and housing policy on well-being. Recent work focuses on the effects of growing up in public housing on children’s long-run outcomes, the consequences of minority enfranchisement on local public finances and the structure of government, and the impacts of land-use regulations on housing markets and neighborhood demographics. He received his PhD in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and his Masters in Public Affairs from the University of Texas, Austin. Prior to receiving his PhD, he conducted research on a range of issues affecting low-income families at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.