Mahesh Somashekhar’s core research agenda concerns how urban economic development and social inequality affect one another. More specifically, he studies the effects of commercial development on urban and suburban communities, with a particular focus on immigrant entrepreneurship, gentrification, and gayborhoods.
Somashekhar is currently pursuing two projects. The first investigates the entrepreneurship patterns of undocumented immigrants in the United States. While it is illegal to employ undocumented immigrants, it is legal for undocumented immigrants to own businesses in the formal economy. Nevertheless, little is known about how firms owned by undocumented immigrants influence economic development and socioeconomic mobility trends.
His second project aims to understand the effect of gentrification on local retailers and community organizations. To that end, Somashekhar is digitizing and geocoding the corpus of the Gayellow Pages, a U.S. directory of local organizations serving LGBTQ+ people that has been in continuous publication since the 1970s. He is using these data to understand whether LGBTQ+ organizations are surviving the gentrification of gay villages, and where they are moving when they are displaced.
Somashekhar’s research has been published in journals including Social Problems, City & Community, Urban Affairs Review, and Economic Development Quarterly. Prior to joining UIC, Somashekhar was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington. He earned a PhD and an MA from Princeton University as well as a BS from Columbia University. More about his background and research can be found on his website.
What would it look like for us to equitably nourish a growing global population? More importantly, how do we get there – which inputs have more leverage within complex systems, and what evidence do decision-makers need in order to support public health? Dr. Marie Spiker approaches public health nutrition research through a food systems lens that recognizes the need for transdisciplinary and multisectoral collaboration.
Dr. Spiker’s research interests include public health nutrition, sustainable food systems, food loss and waste, value chains for nutrition, systems modeling of food supply chains, and capacity building within nutrition and public health. To explore these topics, she draws from training in quantitative and qualitative methods and systems science, as well as her training as a registered dietitian nutritionist. Her professional practice experience includes work with municipal food policy and capacity building within the profession of nutrition and dietetics.
Daiki Hiramori is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Global and Interdisciplinary Studies at Hosei University in Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include quantitative sociology, queer and feminist studies, sexuality and gender stratification, and the demography of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). He graduated from the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and a minor in Mathematics in 2014. He also earned an MA in Sociology in 2016, a Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies in 2018, and a PhD in Sociology in 2022, all from the University of Washington.
He uses quantitative methods to study stratification and inequality based on sexuality and gender as well as sexual and gender minority populations from a queer and feminist perspective. In particular, he is interested in socioeconomic inequality based on SOGI, the measurement of SOGI on surveys, and queer and feminist methodologies. In his dissertation “Sexuality Stratification in Contemporary Japan: A Study in Sociology,” he used the Osaka City Residents’ Survey, one of the few population-based surveys that ask about sexual orientation in Japan, to explore the association between sexual orientation and educational attainment, occupational segregation, and earnings disparities in Japan. His publications have appeared in the
Journal of Population Problems and
Gender and Sexuality. Through his research and educational activities, he is committed to using his privilege as a social scientist to focus on the ways in which systemically marginalized populations, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, become free in a system that operates to oppress them. Please see Daiki’s personal website (
https://hiramori.com/
Stephan Siegel is the Michael G. Foster Endowed Professor of Finance and Business Economics at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business in Seattle, which he joined in 2005. A native of Hamburg, Germany, he earned a B.S. from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and a Ph.D. in Finance from Columbia University in the City of New York. Prior to his graduate studies, Stephan worked in Europe and China as a project manager with GCI Management, Munich, an international private equity and management consulting firm.
Stephan’s research interests are in international finance as well as household finance. Together with his co-authors, he has examined the globalization of financial markets, the integration of European capital markets, and most recently the pricing of political risk. Stephan’s research in household finance has pioneered the use of genetically informed data to explore biological predispositions with respect to risk taking and investment biases. Most recently, he has explored the role of the cultural transmission of preferences about risk and uncertainty.
His research has been published in a large number of academic journals as well as covered by leading news organizations, including, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.
Daniel Enquobahrie is a Professor in UW’s department of Epidemiology, and an Adjunct Professor in Health Systems and Population Health. Dr. Enquobahrie’s research interests span cardiovascular/metabolic, reproductive/perinatal, and genetic/epigenetic epidemiology. His research focuses on (1) pre-pregnancy and early/mid pregnancy risk factors (and associated mechanisms) for pregnancy complications and outcomes, and (2) early life and developmental origins of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases.
Jenna Von Draanen is an Assistant Professor in the department of Child, Family & Population Health Nursing. The aim of Jenna’s research is to improve science and address health disparities through the rigorous evaluation of interventions and their methods of implementation. Her research agenda advances scientific understanding of the social forces influencing mental health and substance use disorders, which is done through a focus on the harms of socioeconomic marginalization and childhood adversity and in a way that includes the perspectives of people with lived experience. Jenna approaches her research with a life course perspective that ensures phenomena like childhood adversity are properly contextualized and situated with an understanding of the way adversities build over time and across generations, through the concept of linked lives. While her primary appointment is in the School of Nursing, she is an interdisciplinary researcher at heart, coming to the UW from a postdoctoral fellowship in Sociology at the University of British Columbia (in Vancouver, Canada), and holding a PhD in Community Health Sciences from UCLA.
Isabelle Cohen joined University of Washington at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance in 2021. Her research focuses on innovations and their potential to change the implementation of governmental and non-governmental activities and services in developing countries, using large-scale randomized control trials to rigorously evaluate new technologies and organizational methods. Her work also touches on many other important issues, including state capacity, taxation, education, financial inclusion, health services, and women’s empowerment. She has done research in a variety of countries, including Uganda, India, Peru, and Greece.
Isabelle holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.P.P. from the College of William & Mary, and a B.A. in International Relations from the College of William & Mary. Prior to beginning her doctorate, Isabelle worked as a Research Manager at the Centre for Microfinance at IFMR Lead in Tamil Nadu, India.
Laura E. Evans joined the Evans School faculty at University of Washington in 2004. She studies race and politics, Native American politics, federalism, and political institutions in the U.S.
Dr. Evans’ work addresses both historic and continuing obstacles to Native American tribal governments’ exercise of sovereignty and self-determination. She documents how tribes respond to their context in order to dismantle barriers and expand opportunities to self-govern. At present, she is analyzing Native American voters’ political and policy priorities, in collaboration with Gabriel R. Sanchez and Raymond Foxworth. She is examining how tribal governments pursue climate change adaptation and mitigation policies-and the forces that advance or thwart their efforts-in collaboration with Nives Dolšak and Aseem Prakash. Also, she is evaluating how tribal activists’ interactions with the U.S. Congress have evolved since the late 19th century.
Dr. Evans explores other dimensions of race and federalism as well. She is writing a book on agenda-setting in suburbs, tentatively titled, Ailing Agendas, Fractured Frames? Understanding the Politics of (In)Equality in America’s Suburbs. She evaluates the frames that suburban officials deploy to justify policies of exclusion, efficiency, or equity.
Dr. Evans’ book, Power from Powerlessness: Tribal Governments, Institutional Niches, and American Federalism (Oxford University Press), examines Native American tribal governments’ relations with states, localities, and the federal government. She wrote the first article on Native American politics ever published in the American Political Science Review, “Expertise and Scale of Conflict: Governments as Advocates in American Indian Politics.”
Dr. Evans was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University and a Brookings Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and a M.P.P. from the University of Michigan. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Vedavati Patwardhan is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Gender Equality Metrics (GEM) team at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at UW Seattle. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy & Management from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington, Seattle. Patwardhan is an applied microeconomist, with research interests in development economics and demography. Her research focuses on women’s economic empowerment, maternal and child health, and program evaluation in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Arjee Restar is an Assistant Professor at University of Washington in the department of Epidemiology. She applies epidemiologic methods to behavioral, social, structural, and health services research and policy to address inequities in health outcomes and access, particularly as experienced by communities of transgender and nonbinary people in the US and Asia. She is expanding transgender health as a field by building research environments that produce high-quality evidence that speaks to the myriad of health priorities of transgender and nonbinary communities at-large, along with community stakeholders, scientists, scholars, and trainees who are also paving this field forward. This work includes advocating for institutional policies and practices that dismantle systems of oppression, inequality, and inequity.