Archives: Affiliates

April Sutton studies education, stratification, gender, and geographic inequalities. Her motivation is to enhance our understanding of the characteristics of schools and communities that produce inequality, and how and why critical life transitions shape inequality. Sutton is especially interested in scrutinizing the institutional and structural mechanisms that maintain or disrupt gender and racial/ethnic inequalities in education, work, and family formation. One of her projects includes research on rural-urban disparities in teen unintended childbearing. She uses nationally representative surveys and federal government data to pursue her research.

Natasha Rivers works at BECU as a social impact, sustainability, and data measurement professional. Natasha is developing a strategic framework around social impact by measuring BECU’s commitment to philanthropy, financial health and education, member engagement, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In her previous role as Demographer for the Seattle School District, Natasha provided data required for Facilities and Capital Levy planning. She conducted scientific research and evaluation studies to measure the impact of Seattle’s affordability crisis, including the rise of K-12 homeless youth. Natasha is civically engaged and has served on several community boards including The Seattle Children’s Theatre, 4Culture, the Urban League and Treehouse for Kids. Natasha earned her PhD in Geography (Population Demography) from UCLA where she studied black identity and contemporary sub-Saharan African migration to and within the U.S.

 

 

 

Katherine Nesse’s research is at the intersection of people and the economy. She is interested in metrics of measuring people and the economy and how those metrics are used to inform policy. Her current research project is creating a new method for estimating demographic characteristics based on the residential environment. She is particularly concerned with methods that produce data for small or sparsely populated areas. She has also researched how people cause the economy to grow, including the different roles that traditional location factors, regulatory factors, labor market and competition factors, and quality of life factors play in business location decisions.

Ryan Petros seeks to improve the lives of people with serious mental illness. As a clinical social worker, he witnessed the pervasive exclusion clients faced from the community around them, health disparities resulting in early mortality, and pathologizing from providers who had not yet adopted service delivery models reflective of the emerging focus on recovery. He obtained a doctoral degree to impact the field on a macro scale and contribute to mental health services research. His work continues to be informed by his practice experience and clinical training in motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioral therapies, and psychiatric rehabilitation. Petros’ research focuses on understanding and promoting recovery, community integration, and total health through evidence-based practices and integrated health care.

Susan Graham a trained clinical epidemiologist who has led and collaborated in numerous research projects related to HIV prevention, care, and pathogenesis since 2004, with over 120 publications in peer-reviewed journals. She is also an infectious diseases specialist with over 15 years’ experience providing HIV care and prevention services, including antiretroviral therapy (ART) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), to patients in the United States and in Kenya. Graham has experience conducting mixed methods research on HIV and mental health, contributing to community-based initiatives to improve care for vulnerable and key populations, and developing and testing interventions to improve health outcomes including ART adherence and HIV test uptake. Her research has included the development of new measures and methods, and generated new data and evidence to support population science. Graham has mentored a number of clinician scientists and trainees in the fields of epidemiology, global health, and psychology.

Dr. Jody Early is an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies and affiliate faculty in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. A social scientist and a Master Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES), Jody’s research, teaching and praxis largely explore social ecological factors that impact the health and well-being of individuals and populations, especially within communities of color. Her research foci can be categorized into three primary areas of inquiry which include: 1) examining bio-psycho-social and ecological factors that impact individual and population health; 2) working with communities to develop, implement, and evaluate culturally tailored health promotion programs and services; and 3) exploring technologies and digital strategies that enhance critical pedagogy in health promotion and in higher education.

Over the last two decades, Jody has dedicated her energy and passion to improving health equity and education. Her work, both in and outside of the academy, has allowed her to collaborate with communities to design, implement, and evaluate, culturally tailored health education interventions and strategies. Her research and practice have also enabled her to spend years working with lay community health workers and promoters, and exploring health promotion models that include community engaged approaches relating to such health issues as: breast and cervical cancer; diabetes, and HIV.

Due to Annie T. Chen’s multidisciplinary background, she integrates methods and approaches from multiple fields in her research, leveraging text mining, visualization, and statistical techniques to better understand people’s behavior and experience. One key area of research expertise is text and visual analytics, particularly in the extraction and visualization of concepts relating to behavior, social and psychological processes, and contexts (e.g. social, environmental). These types of concepts are different in nature than those that are typically extracted (e.g. medications, side effects, and diagnoses) in natural language processing of biomedical texts, and thus require the use of text mining and visualization techniques that are suited to related types of source data and constructs. She has developed systems that display text in novel ways to facilitate pattern discovery, and interactive visualizations based on social media and the rich set of data that we collect from digital interventions, to provide insight about user experience and behavior.

Other than Chen’s methodological interest in data mining and visualization methods for the discovery of behavioral, social, and psychological processes and contexts in text, she is interested in how people’s understanding of a subject forms, and how this changes over time. Most of the subjects that she speaks of are primarily from the health domain, such as “health”, “illness”, “well-being”, though she is also interested in examples from history. Knowledge formation, representation, and diffusion is a process that has tremendous impacts on our lives, over vast spaces and geographical boundaries. She hopes that her research can contribute to improvements in our endeavors as a society to empower people with knowledge that they can use to better their lives.

Anirban Basu is a health economist and a methodologist, who specializes in decision-making, heterogeneity, and evaluations in health care. He is the Stergachis Family Endowed Professor and Director of The Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle. He also holds joint and adjunct appointments in the Departments of Health Services and Economics, and is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has taught courses on decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis and advanced methods in comparative effectiveness research. He also directs the Program on Health Economics and Outcomes Methodology (PHEnOM) at the University of Washington.

Steve Mooney’s core expertise is in developing and analyzing contextual influences on health. As a part of his National Library of Medicine funded K99/R00 project, he is currently developing software to automatically compile measures of neighborhood context for any location in the United States. He has analyzed such contextual variables in relation to health behaviors such as walking and outcomes such as cardiac arrest, and has developed the Neighborhood-Environment Wide Association Study (NE-WAS) design to bring agnostic data-driven approaches to this research domain. He has also worked extensively with GPS device data, during his doctoral career, as part of his K99/R00 project, and as part of a recently launched National Highway Transport Safety Administration project.

Deborah Nadal is a cultural and medical anthropologist specialized in South Asia, with extensive fieldwork experience in Jharkhand, Odisha, Rajasthan and Delhi. Combining her childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian with her academic education as a social scientist, she is currently interested in how people and animals live alongside each other. Her research spans from monkey hunting in foraging societies to dog keeping in the urban setting, with particular attention to disease sharing and transmission across species.

Currently she is working on a 3-year post-doctoral project on dog-mediated rabies in rural Gujarat and Maharashtra, India, that draws from medical anthropology, epidemiology and Indology to investigate the social, cultural and religious determinants of this complex public health issue. This project is funded by the European Commission through a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Global Fellowship. Deborah is affiliated with the Center for One Health Research (University of Washington) directed by Prof. Peter Rabinowitz and with the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine (College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow) where she works under the mentorship of Prof. Sarah Cleaveland.

Deborah holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Verona (Italy) (2014), a M.A. in Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnolinguistics from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) (2009) and a B.A. in Languages, Cultures and Institutions of Eurasian and Mediterranean Countries (Languages: Hindi and Urdu) again from Ca’ Foscari (2007).

She has recently published her first book, “Rabies in the Streets. Interspecies Camaraderie in Urban India” (Penn State University Press, 2020), funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, New York, which is one of the major international funding sources for anthropological research.

Among her other publications: “To kill or not to kill? Negotiating life, death, and One Health in the context of dog-mediated rabies control in colonial and independent India”, in Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains, edited by C. Lynteris, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2019: 91-117; “Pregnant with puppies. The fear of rabies in the slums of New Delhi, India”, Medicine Anthropology Theory 5(3), 2018: 130-156; “The real life of holy cows. How photography has turned cows from sacred icons into mundane animals”, Antennae 40, 2017: 67-76; “Kamadhenu. L’aspetto più materno della Devi nell’Induismo contemporaneo” [Kamadhenu. The most maternal aspect of Devi in contemporary Hinduism], in Motherhood(s) and Polytheisms, edited by G. Pedrucci, C. Terranova and F. Pache Guignard, Patron, Bologna, 2017: 371-382; “Cows caught in the crossfire. Provisional remarks on India’s current cow slaughter debate”, Religions of South Asia 10(1), 2016: 83-106; “Housing ancestors. The reorganization of living spaces among the Birhor of Jharkhand and Odisha”, International Quarterly for Asian Studies, special issue Contemporary Indigeneity in India 46(1-2), 2015: 39-58; “Hunting monkeys and gathering identities: Exploring self-representation among the Birhor of Central-East India”, La Ricerca Folklorica 69, 2014: 263-278