Archives: Affiliates

Teresa’s program of research has focused on sleep health, symptom science, and health outcomes in children with and without chronic health conditions and their caregivers. Currently, Teresa is the Co-Director of the Center for Innovation in Sleep Self-Management funded by NIH, and involved in several studies that integrate community based participatory approaches that integrate technology to improve sleep health in parent-child dyads living with a chronic health condition. Her recent work has focused on sleep health in marginalized communities including caregivers of children with asthma and arthritis, and Filipino migrants. Teresa has clinical expertise as a nurse practitioner working in a pediatric sleep center and in pediatric chronic health conditions, and research expertise in leading interdisciplinary teams, conducting usability and feasibility studies in integrating technology to promote sleep, and integration of shared-management, as well as, successful recruitment and retention strategies in chronic health conditions.

Batool Zaidi is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University. She obtained her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2019. Her research addresses gender inequality in the global South through the analysis of health outcomes, cultural norms, and development projects. Her three-article dissertation examined the relationship between gender inequality, son preference and child outcomes through analysis of family contexts. The articles focused on: 1) understanding gender differentials in child mortality through a theoretically grounded conceptualization of son preference; 2) analyzing generalized versus selective discrimination against Pakistani girls in parental health-seeking practices; and 3) assessing son preference as an explanation for the paradoxical Muslim (versus Hindu) advantage in child mortality in India. This dissertation project advanced her broader agenda of strengthening social demographic scholarship by incorporating consideration of power relations, especially across gender and within families, in international contexts. She is currently developing a South-South comparative study on violence against women in South Asia and Latin America, through the categories of honor killings and femicidios, respectively. Another project will examine the role of marriage systems on son preference and women’s position in their marital home in South Asia. Prior to completing her PhD, Batool was at the Population Council’s Islamabad office, where she worked on projects focusing on family planning, girls education, maternal health, the demographic dividend, and sex-selective abortions.  She has a master’s degree in Population and Development from the London School of Economics and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Mount Holyoke College.

Tim Scharks graduated from the UW Evans School in 2016. His dissertation research draws on psychology, survey experiments, and  media analysis in a mixed-methods approach to understand the role of fear in climate change communication.

Daniel Casey is an epidemiologist at Public Health- Seattle & King County (PHSKC) in the Assessment, Policy Development, and Evaluation Unit. At PHSKC he is mostly focused on creating and monitoring equitable metrics of residential displacement, local migration patterns, and neighborhood change as part of the Communities of Opportunity project. He holds a M.P.H. from the University of Washington.

Cameron T. Whitley, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Western Washington University with expertise in environmental sociology, human-animal studies, and sex and gender. His research is guided by a central question: how do our relationships with others inform our attitudes and behaviors? Substantively, he studies issues concerning the environment (climate change, new energy development, sustainability) and wellbeing, science and technology (geoengineering, hydraulic fracturing debates), human-animal relationships (impacts on mental health, etc.), and gender and sexuality (political engagement and environmentalism).

He is currently working on a project with National Geographic Society affiliated photographers evaluating how their images influence emotional responses and how different individuals (based on demographic characteristics) respond to distinctive images. Beyond this project, he is also exploring what demographic markers among LGBTQIA+ populations (including relationship status) lead to increases in political participation broadly and environmentalism particularly. To date, his published research has explored the sustainability practices of college students, public support for plant-based diets, individual perceptions of environmental risks, the social drivers of climate-induced migration, support for new energy technologies, the demographic and political influences of greenhouse gas emissions, the place of women in conservation networks, and the importance of imagery in eliciting empathy and promoting environmentalism. He enjoys interdisciplinary collaboration and has worked with over 30 different scholars from 20 different fields in producing over four dozen publications that have been featured in journals like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sociological Inquiry, Academic Emergency Medicine, Sociological Perspectives, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, and Clinical Chemistry. His methodological approaches include program evaluation, qualitative, and quantitative applications.

Rawan Arar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California San Diego. Her research program begins with the refugee as a central figure of analysis. Refugee displacement is the manifestation of the breakdown of borders and citizenship rights while refugee status, as a legal construct, is delimited by the principle of sovereignty. Refugees’ lives and life chances are inextricably tied to national and global policies, which create or impede access to basic needs, education, rights, and mobility. Rawan’s research lies at the intersection of these issues and pushes forward debates about states, rights, and theories of international migration.

Clayton Aldern is an advisor, data scientist, and journalist with expertise in homelessness policy, climate change, machine learning, and neuroscience. A Rhodes Scholar and Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, he holds a master’s in neuroscience and a master’s in public policy—with a focus on climate change and security—from the University of Oxford. His journalism has been published by The Atlantic, The Economist, Scientific American, Logic, and many others. From 2017 to 2019, he led the data analysis and program evaluation team for the homelessness programs at Pierce County, Washington.

Kivan Polimis’ interests include researching structural inequality, natural language processing, and developing programming solutions to social problems. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Università Bocconi’s Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy and postdoctoral affiliate at the Bocconi Institute for Data Science and Analytics (BIDSA) in Milan. Kivan has worked with Data Science for Social Good and Microsoft to develop programming solutions in transportation infrastructure and the legal system. His research focuses on combining computational social science approaches with large scale social media to evaluate population dynamics. Kivan is passionate about growing the community of computational social scientists.