Archives: Affiliates

Dr. Darcy Rao is an infectious disease epidemiologist with training and experience in mathematical modeling of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and measurement of sexual behavior and healthcare utilization. Her research interests center on using mathematical models to bridge epidemiologic research and public health practice, with the goal of informing the design and implementation of effective programs and policies. Her current projects include clinical research to evaluate alternate service delivery models for cervical cancer screening among women living with HIV in Washington State, mathematical modeling of HIV and HPV co-infection dynamics to inform cervical cancer prevention in low- and middle-income countries, cost-effectiveness analyses of cervical cancer prevention strategies, and examination of changes in healthcare utilization and sexual behavior associated with COVID-19 social distancing and other mitigation strategies.

Dr. Spring is a demographer and urban sociologist whose research centers on neighborhood context, residential mobility, and spatial inequality. She joined the Sociology Department in 2015 after completing her Ph.D. from the University of Washington and a research fellowship at UW’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.

Her current work investigates how social networks, residential histories, and contextual circumstances influence residential decisions, including not only whether to move, but also where, how far, and to what type of neighborhood. She is particularly interested in how these residential selection mechanisms produce and reinforce broader patterns of spatial inequality, including residential segregation and economic disparities, and contribute to “neighborhood effects” on health and well-being. Her findings show that family networks are very influential in determining who moves (Demography) and explaining racial/ethnic disparities in residential mobility (Social Science Research). Moreover, processes of residential selection contribute to neighborhood effects on health (The Gerontologist) and neighborhood attainment over the life course (American Sociological Review). Her findings also reveal differences in mobility processes among sub-groups, including mixed-race couples (Demography) and same-sex partners (Population Research and Policy Review), highlighting how residential experiences intersect with social statuses and identities.

Dr. Spring is currently a faculty affiliate in the Urban Studies Institute and the Gerontology Institute at Georgia State University. She also serves on the external review board for the Atlanta Research Data Center and on the editorial boards of City & Community and Social Science Research.

Dr. Spring’s teaching interests include urban sociology, sociology of neighborhoods, and research methods.

Frank Edwards is a sociologist broadly interested in social control, the welfare state, race, and applied statistics. His work explores the causes and consequences of the social distribution of state violence through two projects.

The first draws attention to child protection systems as key sites of family disruption. This work shows that American child protection systems are tightly intertwined with carceral and welfare policy systems, and that race and colonization play a central role in explaining the spatial and social distribution of family separation.

The second provides detailed analyses of the prevalence of police-involved killings in the US. This project uses novel data and Bayesian methods to provide estimates of mortality risk by race, sex, and place. It also evaluates how institutions and politics affect the prevalence of police violence.

Edwards’ research has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Public Health, and other outlets. His research has been covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The PBS News Hour, and other outlets.

Kessie Alexandre’s research organizes around questions of public health risk and ethics; environmental racism; climate justice and the social implications of climate change adaptation; Black geographies and diaspora; and the politics and ethics of infrastructure. Alexandre’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Princeton Environmental Institute and Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She published recent work in Geoforum and Current Anthropology.

Her first book project, “Floods and Fountains,” is an ethnographic study of water insecurity and civic participation in Newark, New Jersey, which uncovers concurrent processes of racialization and toxification in a period of industrial waterway pollution, climate change vulnerability, and tap water contamination. Looking beyond the Newark Lead Crisis, the project examines how residents have mobilized around unsafe water flows since the Black Power Movement and how water insecurity continues to shape political subjectivities and social relations in the moment of ongoing crisis.

Her other research projects include a long-term study of water and sanitation access in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake and cholera outbreak. This second project reframes water and land access for Haitians from disaster response to legacies of dispossession and ongoing infrastructural development. Lastly, she is writing on the figure of the “climate refugee” in contemporary discourse and its convergence with racialization at borders in various parts of the Americas.

Originally from Miami, Florida, Professor Alexandre attended Johns Hopkins University and completed her PhD at Princeton University. Beyond her academic life, she enjoys nature walks, herbalism, and listening to soul music and its derivatives.

Jacob (Jake) M. Grumbach is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in spring of 2018 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton.

Professor Grumbach’s research focuses broadly on the political economy of the United States. He is particularly interested in public policy, American federalism, racial capitalism, campaign finance, and statistical methods. His book project, based on his award-winning dissertation, investigates the causes and consequences of the nationalization of state politics since the 1970s. Additional recent projects investigate labor unions, election law, and race and gender in campaign finance. Professor Grumbach teaches courses in statistics for the social sciences and in state and local politics.

Outside of academia, Jake spends his time listening to 70s funk and soul music and 90s hip hop, and supporting the Golden State Warriors.

Patricia Louie is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the role that social factors play in driving racial disparities in physical and mental health. In one stream of research, she focuses on the role of stress and coping resources in explaining Black-White differences in mental health. In a second stream of research, she complicates how race is used as a variable in health disparities research by considering how different specifications of race (such as skin tone or disaggregated multiracial status) can influence how we understand race-health relationships. Currently, Louie is using a cross-national comparative approach to understand how race as a social status plays out across countries with different racial compositions, race and migration histories, and social welfare systems. This project advances the study of racism as a social determinant of health by examining the meaning as well as the implications of race as a system of social stratification across nation states.

Louie’s research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, and American Journal of Epidemiology. To date, she has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ($105,000), the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research, and the Canadian Sociological Association.

Dafeng Xu is an Assistant Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance. Dafeng specializes in data science, and his areas of research include urban and regional policy, immigration policy, and the social and economic history of the United States.

Dafeng’s ongoing research is focused on developing and employing data science tools to link individual records between census, administrative, and survey data. Two projects using methods in data science include linking 1920 and 1930 U.S. census data, and linking 1940 U.S. census data to Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Based on these projects, Dafeng studies the social and economic impacts of urban and regional immigration policies. Study of these policies include how U.S. immigration restriction laws in the 1920s impacted immigrants’ segregation patterns, cultural assimilation, and how local governments responded to natural disasters.

Dafeng received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University in 2016, with a minor in demography. He received his Master’s in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University in 2011. Prior to joining the Evans School in 2019, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Anne Conway is the Urban Child Institute Endowed Professor and Director of the Child and Youth Development Lab (https://utkresearch.wixsite.com/c-ydevelopmentlab) in the College of Social Work at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She studies the development of neurocognition (i.e., focusing attention and ignoring distractions) and self-regulation (i.e., self-management of emotion, behavior, sleep), and associations with child well-being, health, and educational outcomes. Her research has been published in leading journals including Child Development, Psychological Science, Journal of Affective Disorders, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, among others. She has reported findings documenting pronounced disparities in neurocognition based on parental income and education in children entering kindergarten throughout the United States. She has also reported numerous findings on distinct links between early parenting and child temperament in the prediction of children’s neurocognition, emotion regulation, sleep, and mental health. Her most recent paper is currently in press at the journal Developmental Neuropsychology “Longitudinal associations between parenting and inattention, impulsivity, and delay of gratification in preschool aged children: The role of temperamental difficultness and toddler attention focusing” DOI: 10.1080/87565641.2020.1797042.

Avanti Adhia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. She received her doctorate in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. The goal of her research is to prevent interpersonal violence by (1) understanding its causes and consequences and (2) evaluating the role of laws, policies and interventions in reducing violence. She uses multiple, interdisciplinary methods to examine the social and structural determinants of intimate partner violence and sexual violence.