Archives: Affiliates

Rob Kemp is a Senior Forecast Analyst in the Washington State Office of Financial Management’s Population Unit.

Tiffany Pan is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. Pan earned her PhD in Biocultural Anthropology from University of Washington in 2019. Pan is also an alumna of the CSDE Pre-Doctoral Fellowship program, where she completed her Demographic Methods Certificate in 2019.

Bryan L. Sykes is a Chancellor’s Fellow, the Director of Graduate Studies, and an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society (and, by courtesy, Sociology and Public Health) at the University of California-Irvine.  He is an Associate Editor for Science Advances (the Open Access version of Science magazine), an Academic Editor for the Public Library of Science (PLOS) ONE, and a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Sociological Perspectives. Professor Sykes has received awards from the Department of Demography at the University of California-Berkeley, the National Board of Medical Examiners, and the Population Association of America. He has been a National Science Foundation Minority Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Washington and a Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Sykes’ research focuses on demography (fertility and mortality), criminology, population health, mass imprisonment, social inequality, and research methodology.  Professor Sykes’ peer-reviewed research has been published in international social science, medical, and general science journals and university presses. His estimates of racial disparities in incarceration were featured in the National Research Council’s landmark report on “The Growth of Incarceration in the United States” and in the first-ever report on racial inequality in exposure to incarceration in “The State of the Union: The Poverty and Inequality Report”, published by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University.

Deleena Patton (Ph.D. University of Washington, 2014) is a Research Manager with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS). Her research areas include child and family well-being, maternal/child health, public assistance, child welfare, and early childhood development. She provides research and evaluation services to DSHS, other state agencies, and policymakers using integrated administrative data in order to improve the lives of Washingtonians.

Dr. Edwin Wong is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Health Services in the School of Public Health. Edwin Wong’s research interests include: health economics, applied microeconometrics, impact of policy interventions on veterans’ healthcare, comparative effectiveness research and cost-effectiveness analysis.

Dr. Edmund Seto received his PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the quantification of exposures and risk as they relate to environmental and occupational health. Using Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial methods, mathematical models, and novel information technologies, Dr. Seto has conducted exposure assessments for built environment studies of air pollution and noise exposures, exposure assessments of infectious agents in global health contexts, and exposure assessments for environmental justice research. A computer scientist by training, his group explores new technologies such as the use of mobile devices and low-cost sensor systems to infer the relationship between individual and population behaviors and how they relate to exposures to environmental and workplace hazards. Dr. Seto’s rapid prototyping lab fosters interdisciplinary collaboration to create new technologies to improve public health. Dr. Seto is Deputy Director of the UW NIEHS Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics, and Environment (EDGE).

Meghan Romanelli is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work at University of Washington. Romanelli’s research program primarily aims to understand and address the multisystemic factors that lead to mental health disparities among LGTBQ communities, with a focus on the role of service access and treatment engagement. Her current research describes LGBTQ care-seekers’ experiences with healthcare discrimination and barriers to care, examines how depression and suicide disparities among sexual and gender minorities occur through the mechanism of forgone care or restricted engagement in care, and identifies unique community factors that might improve service acceptability (e.g., what are LGBTQ communities already doing to stay healthy and how can we incorporate these strengths into formal services?). The long-term goal of this program of research is to develop a theoretically grounded and tailored engagement intervention that will promote the wellbeing of LGBTQ communities through improved mental health service access.

As a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) with over ten years of experience across various therapeutic settings and modalities, Romanelli considers herself a practice-informed researcher and instructor. As a means to make real-world impact, she integrates her direct practice knowledge, skills, and experiences into both her teaching and research program.

Before joining the UW School of Social Work faculty, Romanelli received training as a pre- and postdoctoral research fellow at the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research. Romanelli earned her PhD from the New York University Silver School of Social Work in 2019. She holds a master’s of science in social work from Columbia University and a BA in Psychology from the College of the Holy Cross.

Laura Dwyer-Lindgren is an Assistant Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. Her research mainly focusses on describing and quantifying geographic patterns and inequalities in population health outcomes and health drivers with the ultimate goal of identifying pathways towards better, more equitable health outcomes for all people. At present, Dr. Dwyer-Lindgren is focussing on two major subject
areas: measuring geographic, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in life expectancy, mortality and morbidity (by cause), and risk exposure in the United States; and estimating/mapping family planning indicators on a fine spatial scale using household survey data in sub-Saharan Africa. At IHME, she leads the US Health Disparities Team which aims to estimate disease burden and disparities in disease burden by location, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status in the United States. She also is a member of the Local Burden of Disease research team, where her focus is mapping the HIV epidemic globally.

Dr. Dwyer-Lindgren received an MPH in Health Metrics and Evaluation from the University of Washington and a PhD in Public Health from Erasmus University, Rotterdam.

Joana Cunha-Cruz is a Professor in the Department of Clinical and Community Services  at the School of Dentistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She also holds an affiliate appointment position in the Department of Oral Health Sciences in the School of Dentistry at UW. She is a public health researcher and educator with dental and epidemiology degrees with more than 10 years of public health academic experience.

As a public health researcher with degrees in dentistry and public health epidemiology, Cunha-Cruz’s focus has been on epidemiological and intervention studies on pediatric oral conditions in Alaska Native, Latinx and low-income rural communities, as well as data analyses of national surveys and complex datasets merging different types of electronic health records. Her research explores the biosocial determinants of oral health and explore solutions for health inequities.

Cunha-Cruz received her Dental degree from the State University of Pernambuco, Brazil and MPH and PhD in Public Health (Epidemiology) from the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Trevor Peckham is a research scientist at the Hazardous Waste Management Program at the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks. His research is focused on marshalling demographic, environmental, and economic data to understand the burden of exposures to hazardous materials across sociodemographic groups in King County.

Peckham received an MPA in Environmental Policy & Management, an MS in Environmental Health, and a PhD in Environmental & Occupational Hygiene from the University of Washington.