Archives: Affiliates

Ryan Gabriel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Brigham Young University. He earned his PhD in Sociology at the University of Washington in 2016. Ryan’s research interests include: urban sociology, residential segregation, residential mobility and neighborhood attainment, and legacies of racial violence.

Nick C. Huntington-Klein is an Assistant Professor at Seattle University. Nick earned his PhD and MA in Economics from the University of Washington. Prior to that, Nick earned his BA in Economics and Mathematics at Reed College. Information about Nick’s research interests and work can be found on his website.

Afra Mashhadi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing and Software Systems at the University of Washington – Bothell. Dr. Mashhadi is a research scientist in the domain of Ubiquitous Computing. She is interested in developing mathematical and computational models that leverage the proliferation of sensors and breakthroughs in machine learning to (1) understand societies and social phenomena at different spatial scales (2) model social dynamics of human behavior. More specifically her research focus is on sensing, modeling, understanding and predicting human behavior using the ‘digital traces’ that are generated daily in our online and offline lives. Results of Dr. Mashhadi’s research have been published in top-tier conferences (WSDM, CHI, CSCW, Ubicomp, ICWSM) and journals, and trialled as part of multiple deployments in European projects and private entities such as WebSummit.

Jamie Goodwin-White is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at UCLA. Dr. Goodwin-White’s research interests include migration and immigration, inequality, labor markets, and social statistics. Dr. Goodwin-White teaches courses on population geography, social geography, inequality, race and ethnicity, and migration.

Rebecca Rebbe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. Rebecca’s research examines the measurement of and community responses to child maltreatment. Her research is informed by 7 years of post-MSW practice working with families involved with the child welfare system, in both the public and private sectors. Rebecca has training using demographic methods and specializes in using population-based linked administrative datasets to better understand child maltreatment. She frequently partners with the Children’s Data Network at the University of Southern California and the Center for Social Sector Analytics & Technology at the University of Washington School of Social Work. Rebecca is the principal investigator of the NICHD-funded research project “The impact of COVID-19 on child maltreatment-related medical encounters and system responses using linked administrative data” (1R21HD105907-01). Her work has been published in academic journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of Pediatrics, and Child Maltreatment.

For more information on Rebecca’s research, please refer to her USC faculty webpage.

Angela Bruns is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology at Gonzaga University. Her research focuses on how families’ interactions with two social institutions—mass incarceration and the low-wage labor market—impact their health and economic well-being. She teaches courses on gender, family, mass incarceration, and social statistics.

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology at Cornell University in 2019 and my J.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014.

My scholarship examines how systems of law and agents of the state create and enforce various modes of state violence. In one thread of this research, I examine how the legal construction of tribal sovereignty has changed over time in U.S. courts, and the implications of this change for the social, political, and legal status of Native children and families.

In the second, I study police and policing at the intersection of race, class, and labor law. Here I examine police as workers in relationship to 1) police unions and their contracts, city councils, citizen review boards, and body-worn cameras, alongside 2) local community activism against police misconduct that reimagines the future of policing using a variety of employment mechanisms. In combination, my research exposes local conditions that attempt to 1) increase the likelihood that officers will not be held accountable for their actions, and 2) silence community voices speaking out against injustice.

My new research draws from my theoretical contributions in both areas and addresses the intersection of sovereignty, policing, and inequality for American Indians. In this developing work, I show that the extractive and exploitative nature of settler colonialism has enduring impacts on the likelihood of Native exposure to state violence today.

My research can be found in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, the Nevada Law Journal, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and the Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture, and Resistance. Additionally, my work has been recognized with generous funding from the William T. Grant Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

Jelanie Ince is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Washington. Jelani’s primary work uses qualitative methods to examine how and why racial inequality persists in the United States.

Another area of Jelani’s research focuses on how digital communities and social movement behavior shape public opinion and influence the political process. Specifically, examining the Movement for Black Lives: the various tactics that actors use to disseminate information about movement activity and deploy frames for recruitment, inclusion, and resistance.

Some of Jelani’s previous work has been featured in Ethnic and Racial Studies and Sociology Compass. His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation and the Center for Research on Race & Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) at Indiana University.

Hilary Bethancourt is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Hilary is passionate about working toward comprehensive and integrative approaches to addressing the social inequities and modifiable diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors that negatively impact physiological, mental, and emotional well-being. She appreciates learning about the sources of biological, social, cultural, and ecological diversity that help shape each individual’s uniqueness and contribute to variable responses to a given diet, lifestyle, or stressor. She is always in pursuit of research projects that can help call attention to the need for public health and nutrition intervention programs that are adequately tailored to individuals’ and communities’ distinct needs, circumstances, and experiences. Currently Hilary is engaged in research focused on quantifying water insecurity experiences among individuals in low- and middle-income settings; identifying who is most in need of safe and reliable water access; and examining how water security relates to food security, physical health, and mental well-being.

Caislin Firth, PhD, MPH is a Research Scientist at the Addictions, Drug & Alcohol Institute (ADAI) at the University of Washington (UW).

Caislin is a social epidemiologist interested in unpacking how public policies shape social and built environments and their influence on health inequities. This pursuit requires interdisciplinary research methods that prioritize community engagement and intersectoral collaborations, given that the mechanisms of change (policy, zoning, infrastructure) often lie outside the purview of public health and academia. With a background working in local government in the Pacific Northwest, Caislin’s research goes beyond answering the questions “do population health interventions (e.g. cannabis legalization) improve health?” by also considering what works, for whom, and in which contexts. In practice, Caislin has studied the underlying causes of inequities in substance use, criminal justice, mobility, and transportation outcomes and the relationships between neighborhood environments and health.

Caislin leads a research program that uses community science to design equitable healthy cities and mitigate negative health effects of gentrification (GENUINE, funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research). Caislin’s research spans criminal justice, cannabis, healthy city, and population health intervention research with a predisposition towards spatial epidemiology, multi-level modeling, and applying novel epidemiologic methods to research projects.

Caislin is a Horowitz Foundation Social Policy Fellow and received a PhD in Epidemiology from the UW where her dissertation focused on the impacts of adult cannabis legalization on socio-spatial health inequities for youth. Caislin is a consulting editor for Cannabis.