Julie Morris is Director of the Center for Social Science Instruction in the Department of Sociology at Western Washington University. Julie holds a BA in Sociology from Gonzaga University and an MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington. Julie’s research interests focus on statistics, demography, and social determinants of health and medicalization; specifically as they relate to stress, health behaviors, and mental health outcomes. Julie came to Western after working as a Research Scientist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and as a Data Scientist for Starbucks.
Archives: Affiliates
Chen, Vivien
Dr. Vivien Chen is currently a research analyst at the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee (JLARC) of the State of Washington. She conducts performance auditing and evaluation on state-funded policies and programs. Prior to JLARC, Vivien was a research lead and coordinator for the Education Research & Data Center (ERDC), where she facilitated the build-up of the state student longitudinal administrative data warehouse and provided evidence-based research to inform policymaking.
Vivien received a doctoral degree in Education Policy Studies with a minor in Demography from The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on policy evaluation, educational equity and equality, demographic research method. Topics of her research include family structure, children of immigrants, school choice and neighborhood segregation, STEM learning, college financial aid, human capital cultivation, and education and workforce outcomes for children/youth in foster care or experiencing homelessness.
Sherr, Kenneth
Dr. Sherr’s research focuses on developing and testing practical solutions to support data-driven decision making and service integration into the Primary Health Care framework to improve health system coverage and quality. Dr. Sherr developed the Systems Analysis and Improvement Approach (SAIA), which packages systems engineering tools to support front-line health workers to iteratively improve prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) services. Originally tested through a cluster randomized trial in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and Mozambique, SAIA is currently being scaled-up for PMTCT services in Mozambique, and adapted to address other chronic care needs in low and middle-income countries (including mental health services, integrated HIV testing into family planning clinics, and pediatric HIV testing and linked treatment).
Dr. Sherr leads an implementation research project supported through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s African Health Initiative that assesses the effectiveness of an enhanced audit and feedback intervention on implementation of national guidelines to address the main causes of neonatal mortality in Mozambique, and builds implementation research capacity for public sector officials.
Dr. Sherr has led the development of implementation science training curricula at the University of Washington Department of Global Health, including the development of the world’s first PhD program in implementation science. Dr. Sherr received his PhD in Epidemiology and MPH in International Health/Health Services from the University of Washington, and a BA in Anthropology/Sociology from Kenyon College.
Garrison, Michelle
Child and adolescent sleep problems; interactions between media use, physical activity, and sleep, and the impact on health and behavior; development and testing of health behavior change interventions; pediatric inpatient quality of care and quality improvement research
Leung, ManChui
Lee, Hedwig
Hedwig (Hedy) Lee is a Professor of Sociology at the Washington University in St. Louis. She received her BS in Policy Analysis from Cornell University in 2003 and her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. After receiving her PhD, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan, School of Public Health from 2009 to 2011.
She is broadly interested in the social determinants and consequences of population health and health disparities, with a particular focus on race/ethnicity, poverty, race-related stress, and the family. Hedy’s research draws from multiple sources of data to investigate these relationships, including the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Chicago Community Adult Health Study, National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, National Health Interview Survey, National Survey of American Life, and Twitter. Hedy is very interested in engaging in interdisciplinary research and has published and worked with scholars across a wide range of fields including sociology, demography, psychology, political science, public health and medicine.
Her recent work examines the impact of family member incarceration on the health and attitudes of family members, association between discrimination and mental and physical health, documenting trends in racial/ethnic health disparities, socioeconomic causes and consequences of obesity in childhood and adolescence, and using social media data for demographic and health research. Hedy currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on topics related to racial/ethnic health disparities and the social determinants of population health.
Rosenfeld, Jake
Jake Rosenfeld (Phd, Princeton University) is Professor of Sociology at Washington University-St. Louis, and Faculty Affiliate of the Sociology Department at the University of Washington, where he taught from 2007-2015. His research and teaching focuses on the political and economic determinants of inequality in the advanced democracies. He is primarily interested in who gets paid what and why – and how this varies across time and place. In his work Rosenfeld examines major developments that have disrupted past practices of wage-setting, especially labor union decline and the resulting changes in the ways firms allocate wages.
Rosenfeld has published research in various outlets, including the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Foreign Affairs. His book, What Unions No Longer Do, was published by Harvard University Press in 2014, and covered in a range of publications, including the New York Times and New Yorker. His forthcoming book, You’re Paid What You’re Worth and Other Myths of the Modern Economy will be published by Harvard University Press in January, 2021.
Catron, Peter
My research focuses on the socioeconomic mobility and assimilation of immigrants throughout history. I am generally interested in how processes of mobility and labor market outcomes of immigrants are interlinked with societal institutions and economic structures that may condition individual efforts to make it in America. Currently, I am taking advantage of the advent of digitized historical data of US censuses, passenger records, and company personnel files to explore mobility trends of immigrants who entered the US between 1880 and 1924. These data sets allow me to recreate the immigrant experience over the life course, following individuals from the passenger list to US censuses and then tracking them and their families through subsequent censuses over time. By having longitudinal data of individuals, the first of their kind in sociology, I am able to identify the specific mechanisms that helped or hindered economic mobility in the first half of the twentieth century both within and across generations.
Utah-Adjibola, Amarachi
Amarachi Utah-Adjibola currently works within the Global Growth and Global Development teams to invest in strategic research, policies and systems in the areas of agricultural development, nutrition and family planning. Prior to that, she worked as a Research Analyst at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) conducting macro policy analysis of agricultural trade strategy, food security, and micro-level household farm behavior linked to agricultural and regional economy-wide models. During this time she also worked as a consultant with the Development Economics Unit of the World Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Division where she worked extensively on the implementation of several rounds of the Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) administered by the World Bank in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Malawi. Amarachi’s primary research interests include food security, labor, migration, growth, structural transformation and poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to University of Pennsylvania, Amarachi completed her JD in International Law from Villanova University, and her MA in Development Economics from American University.
Jones-Smith, Jessica
Dr. Jones-Smith is an associate professor in the departments of Health Systems and Population Health and Epidemiology and a core faculty member of the Nutrition Sciences Program. She is an epidemiologist, health policy researcher, and population heath scientist with expertise in social and structural determinants of weight-related health. Specifically, her research focuses on investigating upstream drivers of nutrition-related health inequities and follows three main lines: 1) Identifying the Health Impacts of Policies that Address Social and Structural Determinants; 2) Rigorous Evaluation of Nutrition Policies Aimed at Improving Dietary Intake and Population Health; 3) Identifying the role of economic and community resources, including food environments, in weight-related health.
Her research is interdisciplinary and is focused on obtaining actionable results to address upstream social factors, contexts, and policies that influence population health. Her research has been funded by diverse sources including the National Institutes of Health, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the City of Seattle.
Related to the work of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, Dr. Jones-Smith is a population health scientist and has repeatedly received support from the Population Dynamics Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for her research, including a fully funded 2-year traineeship with the Carolina Population Center as a doctoral student, a K99/R00 Early Independence Career Award, and most recently an NIH R01 award.
Dr. Jones-Smith has a Masters of Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley, a doctorate in Nutrition Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and post-doctoral training in health inequities and causal inference.