Archives: Affiliates

Dr. Santaularia (she/her/ella) is an interdisciplinary population health researcher. Before coming to UW she was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Population Science with the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She completed her doctoral training in Epidemiology from the University of Minnesota and Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Dr. Santaularia worked in various capacities with local and state governments in epidemiological surveillance and practice. Her primary areas of research include violence prevention, social epidemiology, health equity, social determinants of health, and analytical methods to obtain causal estimates in social epidemiology when traditional randomized control trials are either not feasible or unethical. Dr. Santaularia’s current body of research examines how: (1) social and institutional determinants influence violence; and (2) violence gets under the skin or is ‘embodied’ to impact health. She aims to expand this research to better understand the cumulative influence of violence over the life course as well as the roles of society, community, psychosocial and family protective factors in offsetting negative outcomes due to violence. Ultimately, she will build on this research to develop and test scalable interventions in underserved populations informed by understanding the role of larger social structures, familial and cultural contexts.

Over the past decade, Ahmed Abdeen Hamed has dedicated himself to academic training, cultivating a robust foundation that seamlessly integrates into both his academic and industrial pursuits in Data Science. His primary research objectives revolve around addressing intricate challenges in clinical data science and network medicine, deploying computational solutions to advance the understanding of complex diseases, such as cancer, from clinical, genetic, and pharmaceutical standpoints. Within the academic realm, his ambition extends beyond personal growth. He is committed to democratizing knowledge in problem-solving, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, not only for the local student community but also for scientists and professionals within my field.

His journey has been marked by leadership in diverse research projects, particularly in the field of Biomedical literature mining. Notably, a project closely aligned with the proposed venture involved mining the Biomedical literature to uncover drug-disease links and algorithmically ranking their chemical molecules based on specificity. During his tenure as an R&D scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, he designed and implemented an algorithm, leading to academic publications and eventual patenting under US Patent 10,978,178 in 2021. This groundbreaking work laid the foundation for his subsequent endeavors in Drug Repurposing. The relevance of this research became glaringly evident with the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic. While the world sought effective treatments for the novel Coronavirus, he delved into the Biomedical literature to identify potential drug options for Covid-19 treatment.

The outcomes of this research materialized into seminal publications introducing computational medicine methods and algorithms for identifying repurposed drug combinations in Covid-19 treatment. Notably, some of these discovered combinations, now known as Paxlovid, were manufactured by Pfizer, underscoring the translation of research into tangible market solutions. Funded by the United States of America and the FNP, this research not only responded to a global crisis but also laid the groundwork for broader applications, extending into diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

Since November 2022, he has been closely observing the rise of Generative AI and its remarkable capabilities in answering questions, fact-checking, and detecting fake science. During this period, he has actively engaged in assessing the credibility of content generated by tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Additionally, his research has expanded into computational medicine, exploring how Generative AI can accelerate drug discovery for complex diseases such as cancer.

Elizabeth Hirsh is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, where she studies work and employment, organizational dynamics, gender and race inequality, and the law.

Much of her work focuses on employment discrimination and the policies and practices that minimize bias. Hirsh regularly presents her research to professional and policy audiences and consults with governmental agencies in both Canada and the U.S.

At UBC, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on work, inequality, and quantitative data analysis. While not at work, Hirsh spends her time running, enjoying the beautiful outdoors, keeping up with her three children, and coaching youth sports.

Hilary Schwandt earned her BS in Biochemistry from California Polytechnic State University. After graduating from Calpoly she lived in Jamaica for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer. She then earned her master’s and her doctoral degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Hilary’s doctoral dissertation was on unsafe abortion in Ghana and included a qualitative study on the pathways to abortion, a comparison of incomplete pregnancy patients and a randomized, noninferiority trial of group vs. individual family planning counseling. Her main area of research interest is reproductive health. Just prior to joining Fairhaven College, Hilary was working in the research division at the Center for Communication Programs in Baltimore, Maryland. At the Center for Communication Programs she was the technical monitoring and evaluation advisor for numerous projects, such as the Go Girls Initiative! – a project that aimed to reduce adolescent girls’ vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in Botswana, Malawi, and Mozambique; the Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative – a project that aimed to reduce the barriers to family planning use among the urban poor; a prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission project in Ethiopia; and a malaria prevention during pregnancy project in Zambia. Hilary grew up in Bellingham and she is delighted for the opportunity to live once again in Bellingham and work with the esteemed Fairhaven College faculty.

Holly Hummer is a Sociologist with interests in family, gender, and work. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in 2024 and will be a visiting scholar at the University of Washington for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Her research is broadly focused on the mechanisms shaping individuals’ family and employment pathways and on how these pathways play into broader demographic and social patterns. Much of this work sits at the intersection of family sociology, feminist and gender scholarship, cultural sociology, and population studies. She has a deep interest in advancing and advocating for the use of qualitative and cross-national, comparative methods to understand social life.

Anwesha Pan is a biological anthropologist working primarily with the populations in South Asia and the United States. Her research focuses on the association between environmental stressors (e.g., poverty, famine) and female reproductive health. She uses theories and methods from anthropology, evolutionary biology, and demography to understand how environmental adversity throughout the life course and disparities in reproductive health.

Hanjie Wang is a Political Scientist with research and teaching interests in international and comparative political economy, environmental politics, and Chinese politics. Her current work focuses on the comparative analysis of electric vehicle policies in China, the US, and India, alongside the underlying politics of global EV trade and investment policies. She has a broad interest in the role of governments in facilitating green technological transitions and in the interactions between trade and environmental policies.

She earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington and will commence her role as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center starting August 2024. Hanjie has received training in demographic methodology from the UW Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) in 2024, and she is interested in examining how population changes influence environmental impacts.

Helen Pineo is an urban planner and Research Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on how development, regeneration and urban policy can support health and sustainability. She contributes to the evidence base about why and how to do healthy urbanism by using transdisciplinary approaches and amplifying the needs of under-represented communities and the planet.

With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Helen is currently leading Change Stories, a research project that uses ethnographic methods to learn from the cultures, narratives and contexts that have supported shifts to equitable and sustainable development. She is co-investigator on a study investigating the health and health equality impacts of housing converted from non-residential buildings in England, funded by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research. Her past research has used participatory, systems thinking and other methods, to study: overcrowding and COVID, integration of health objectives in new property development, conceptualization of multi-scalar health impacts of urban environments (see Healthy Urbanism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), evidence use in government policy and decision-making, and urban health indicators and their use by planners.

Ipsita Dey is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas Department. She comes to UW Seattle from Princeton University, where she received her PhD in Anthropology. Her work is at the intersection of Pacific Island Studies, Indigeneity Studies, South Asian Diaspora Studies, Environmental Anthropology, and ethnographic ethics. Ipsita’s current book project, “Home on the Fijian Farmscape”, explores how Indo-Fijians articulate connections to land and country through agricultural practice, claiming a complex mode of diasporic nativity in response to resurgent Fijian indigenous ethno-nationalist politics

Morgan P. Vickers is an Assistant Professor of Race/Racialization in the Department of Law, Societies & Justice at the University of Washington. Vickers researches racialized ecologies, 20th-century infrastructure projects, and eco-social repair.

Vickers received their Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and their B.A. in American Studies, Communication Studies, and Non-Fiction Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Black Studies Collaboratory.

Vickers is currently a Content Editor for Environmental History Now and an Executive Board member of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). They previously worked with The Black Geographic, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Community Histories Workshop, A Red Record, and the Landscape Specialty Group of AAG.