Raphael Mondesir spent three years as an adjunct instructor at SPU before joining the Sociology Department as a full-time faculty member in the fall of 2017. He earned both his master’s and doctorate in sociology at the University of Washington. Before moving to Seattle for his graduate studies, Dr. Mondesir lived in Massachusetts where he earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at Salem State University.
His research agenda stands at the crossroads of economic sociology, the sociology of religion, global development studies, and political sociology. Dr. Mondesir is currently investigating how civic participation affects rural development in the absence of a central state and the role of religion in the structuration of civic networks. He also takes a particular interest in the role that NGOs and other organizations play in the aid channels that sustain global development.
Much like his research, Dr. Mondesir’s teaching reflects a passion for debates about inequality, development processes, and the integration of marginalized groups. His lectures often focus on how the poor and downtrodden make decisions and express their agency under the weight of both visible and invisible power structures that are at play in their environment. One of his primary pedagogical goals is to gently challenge his students to confront their misconceptions about social inequality, discrimination, and privilege.
I am a health services researcher focused on quality and costs of care for medically complex patients. I am particularly interested in understanding how features of the health care delivery system and payment policies affect the quality and efficiency of care received by older adults with multimorbidity, with dementia, and people at the end of life.
Tracy Mroz, PhD, OTR/L is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, School of Medicine at the University of Washington. Dr. Mroz is a health services researcher with a clinical background in occupational therapy. Her research focuses on the impact of health policy and delivery system factors on access to and quality of post-acute care services for older adults and adults with disabilities, with an emphasis on home health care and care provided in rural communities. Her primary research approach is secondary analysis of large data sets, including Medicare administrative data, survey data, and community-level data. As an investigator with the WWAMI Rural Health Research Center and the UW Center for Health Workforce Studies, she is leading studies on post-acute care in rural communities and therapy workforce.
Dr. Fishman is a health care economist with expertise in designing and conducting analyses of health service use and cost and the organization of health care systems with a specific emphasis on primary care. Dr. Fishman is also an expert on the organization and management of large databases for use in health services research. As part of a comprehensive research program on costs and outcomes associated with different clinical and behavioral health states and conditions, Dr. Fishman has examined the cost implications of a variety of modifiable health behaviors and addictive disorders including alcohol abuse and chemical dependency, tobacco use, over-weight and obesity, as well as behavioral health issues including depression and anxiety disorders. This research has allowed Dr. Fishman to gain expertise in the analysis of health care use and cost data related to the examination of how health behaviors impact heath service use and health care outcomes, as well as the empirical methods best suited to assess health service use and cost over time as well as at any point in time.
Sarah Stone is Executive Director of the University of Washington’s eScience Institute and a Deputy Director for the West Big Data Innovation Hub (WBDIH). Stone has a passion for fostering education and research collaborations across disciplines. She co-leads the UW Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program and is involved in thematic development for the WBDIH Metro Data Science working group. In her role as eScience Director of Data Science Education, she co-chairs the Education and Career Paths Special Interest Group and helps departments across campus develop data science specializations. Stone handles eScience operations and planning, serving as a primary contact for university and industry partners, funding agencies and the public. Prior to joining eScience, Stone was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Oceanography at Humboldt State University in northern California. She has been involved in several large, interdisciplinary research projects in oceanography and has a specialty in zooplankton ecology.
Anissa Tanweer is a research scientist at the eScience Institute focused on human-centered data science. Her work incorporates a range of qualitative methods for studying the practice and culture of data-intensive computational work, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation.
She is passionate about sociotechnical thinking, collaborating with data science teams, and leveraging action research to foster reflexive, ethical data science practices. In particular, she engages with efforts to harness data for societal benefit, and has both studied and helped develop the eScience Institute’s annual Data Science for Social Good program.
Jose is a Data Scientist at the University of Washington’s eScience Institute. Jose’s interests include the application of data science methods on sociological and educational data and building data tools to facilitate that process. Jose’s research combines theory and practice with data science methods to inform education policymaking. Previously he was a data scientist with the Center for Education Results, a local non-profit, where he leveraged statistical and machine learning methods to explore education data and where he now serves as Data Science Senior Fellow. Jose earned his doctorate at the UW, with a focus in statistics and measurement and a Master of Education in policy, also from UW. His doctoral research focused on assessing causal inference methodology in the absence of randomization on complex data structures.
Abraham Flaxman, PhD, is Associate Professor of Health Metrics Science and Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. He is currently leading the development of new methods for cost effective analysis with microsimulation and is engaged in methodological and operational research on verbal autopsy. Dr. Flaxman has previously designed software tools such as DisMod-MR that IHME uses to estimate the Global Burden of Disease, and the Bednet Stock-and-Flow Model, which has produced estimates of insecticide-treated net coverage in sub-Saharan Africa. This work uses Integrative Systems Modeling to combine a system dynamics model of process with a statistical model of data to bring together all available sources of information.
Benjamin Cerf an economist in the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau and a Regional Research Affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. His research uses linked administrative and survey data to investigate experiences of marginalized populations. The first branch of his work investigates several aspects of U.S. antipoverty programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Earned Income Tax Credit, including non-participation, multiple program participation, and misreporting of participation in surveys. He has presented work using SNAP administrative records at meetings of the Association for Public Policy and Management, the American Statistical Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. Another branch of his work focuses on the demographics and labor market outcomes of transgender individuals living in the United States. This work has been presented at the Population Association of America and the Society of Labor Economists and was written about in the New York Times.
In addition to his scholarly research, Ben has been the lead developer of several products the Census Bureau provides to partner states that share administrative data from the SNAP, WIC, and TANF programs. His work in this area has involved working closely with representatives from states and other federal agencies to identify and address critical information needs, develop scalable suites of statistical programs to automatically generate reports, and communicate results to a wide variety of stakeholders.