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.
Muazu Alhaji Shamaki works at the Department of Geography, Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. He is currently on sabbatical with Demography and Social statistics Department, Federal University Birnin Kebbi-Nigeria and is the present HOD. Muazu does research in Human Development Demography and Population Health, Health Geography and Cultural Anthropology. Their current project is ‘Maternal Health’.
Dr. Dornell Pete is a member of the Navajo Nation and an epidemiologist who uses community-engaged approaches to study the factors influencing stomach cancer, including lifestyle, environmental, and pathogenic factors (such as H. pylori infections and gut microbiome) in Native American communities. Dr. Pete aims to identify strategies for cancer prevention and intervention while improving overall gastrointestinal health. Current projects include the Navajo ABID (Stomach) Study, which is designed to be tribally based and driven.
Maria Y. Rodriguez, MSW, PhD Rodriguez joined the University at Buffalo in 2020. Her research is at the intersection of applied demography, computational social science, and social policy. Dr. Rodriguez’ work explores systems of care across technology and human services. From offline child welfare systems to online social media platforms, her work examines the systems we build to care for marginalized groups, particularly how we make decisions about whom those groups are. Based on a central tenet of ethical social work practice, the aim of Dr. Rodriguez’ work is to support the reorientation of systems towards working best for outlier cases. In her work, Dr. Rodriguez explores if and how the values and ideals that define systems can come from the lived experience of the system involved.
April Fernandes’ work focuses on a range of outcomes, from physical and mental health, employment prospects and wage outcomes, as well as the impacts of monetary punishment from legal financial obligations and practices such as pay-to-stay, where states sue incarcerated people for the room and board costs of their incarceration. This work has succeeded in expanding inquiries beyond felony incarceration and bringing compelling theoretical and empirical analysis to both seen and unseen forms of social control and punishment. In addition, Dr. Fernandes’ future research will include an expanded exploration of the intersection between criminal legal contact and disability, looking specifically at the prevalence of people with traumatic brain injuries in jails and prisons and focusing on the experience and outcomes of their time in confinement. Dr. Fernandes has a robust pipeline of publications of both co-authored and sole-authored pieces and public and private grant applications that will ensure continued productivity within the field as well as transmission of these findings through public and policy-related scholarship.