Archives: Affiliates

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.

Nicole Eisenberg is a Senior Research Scientist at the Social Development Research Group and the Director of International Programs at The Center for Communities That Care. She has contributed to or led numerous projects aimed at promoting wellbeing and/or preventing behavioral health problems among children and youth. With expertise in prevention science, program evaluation, and international collaborations, her work has focused on understanding and measuring risk and protective factors and developmental outcomes in children and youth, extending the reach of preventive interventions and adapting them to new contexts, and the use of qualitative and mixed methods research. She has also worked collaboratively with communities to help them collect and use survey data for decision making and prevention planning.

Dr. Salene Jones is a psychologist whose research focuses on cancer care delivery, the patient experience and quality of life. She is particularly interested in psychometrics, which is the development of valid and reliable questionnaires for patient-reported outcomes to assess pain, depression, anxiety and other facets of quality of life. A member of the health economics group, the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research, Dr. Jones also examines the association of financial worry and anxiety with outcomes in people with cancer. Her research includes studies of the relationship of health anxiety and fear of cancer to health care use and cancer prevention.

Dr. Martinez’s research focuses on the etiology of substance use and internalizing mental health problems among ethnically and racially diverse populations, with an emphasis on Latinx adolescents and young adults. Her program of research also aims to understand risk and protective factors for substance use and internalizing mental health problems that may inform areas of emphasis in interventions that support the health and well-being of adolescents and young adults.