Archives: Affiliates

My primary interests include community sustainable design and development in an international context; urban design and planning history and theory with an emphasis on social and environmental factors; and qualitative and quantitative research methods for evaluating the efficacy of urban form, including challenges of cross-cultural research. Specifically, I focus on the history and contemporary conditions of urbanism and development in the Americas, with an emphasis on public space and the public realm. In particular, I examine the narrative roles that built landscapes play in: politics and society, ecology, and human health and well-being. Thus, first, my work on pedagogical urbanism in Latin America and the United States examines the use of public space to front city regeneration projects. Second, my work on visible ecology critiques and directs the development of eco-literacy in community design and development practices. Finally, my work on human health and well-being is currently being developed through my Mobile Cities project centered on public space investment and community mobility planning in metro transit station projects. These themes are linked by a focus on understanding, reading, critiquing, and modifying narratives in the built environment. Of particular interest to me is the concept of legibility, or comprehensibility, and whether legible environments are capable of shaping sustainable urban places, practices, and policies.

Maria Bleil, Ph.D. is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Child, Family and Population Health Nursing. Dr. Bleil’s research takes a life course perspective in studying how individual- and environmental-level factors affect the timing and course of major reproductive events such as puberty and menopause as well as how such events shape trajectories of risk for chronic disease development, especially related to cardio-metabolic disease. This work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. Currently, Dr. Bleil is the principal investigator of two NIH-funded grants. The first grant is testing a life course model in which pubertal timing/tempo is hypothesized to play a mechanistic role in linking early life adversity and adulthood health. The second grant is examining environmental risk factors for accelerated reproductive aging, leading to earlier onset menopause. It is anticipated that Dr. Bleil’s work focusing on women’s reproductive health will have strong implications for interventions targeting children and young women to more effectively prevent/manage cardio-metabolic disease risk over the life course.

Jacqueline is a User Researcher in the Experiences and Devices Management organization at Microsoft in Redmond. In her current role, she uses a mixed methods research approach in her work with design and engineering teams to understand the needs of enterprise customers who use Microsoft products.

I am a trained behavioral scientist and have had an active career in applied research. My interests span a wide range of social and behavioral topics including gender and social change programming, participatory governance approaches, and quality improvement strategies on improving reproductive and maternal health outcomes. I have also supported innovation and implementation of programs to improve effectiveness of frontline workers, to increase use of data for decision-making, and to build capacity of government and partners to provide family planning (including long-acting methods) for adolescents and for women and girls in fragile and crisis-affected settings.

Marlaine Figueroa Gray, PhD, is a medical anthropologist with a passion for eliciting illness narratives and health care experiences from patients, family members and medical professionals. She has researched how the intersection of creative practices and medical care provide insight into understanding the logic of biomedical care, what counts as evidence that a creative activity “works,” and how arts activities can serve as a model of how to provide better, more patient-and-family centered care. She is particularly interested in how we attend to patient suffering, and in what types of care are possible when there are no medical treatments available.

Dr. Hough has an earned doctorate in sociology with concentrations in demography and social statistics. He has accumulated over 30 years of knowledge accessing and analyzing federal and local statistical systems, and over 20 years of experience turning data into information addressing state, local and tribal government research needs. He served as the Coordinator of the State Data Center programs for both Washington and Oregon states from 1993‐2005, acting as the lead contact with the US Census Bureau for dissemination, training and analysis of Department of Commerce data products.

He also served as director of the Population Research Center (PRC) at Portland State University (PSU) from 2006-2009. As PRC director he had ultimate responsibility for the credibility of the annual, official Oregon population estimates for the state, counties and cities.  He helped refine many of the data inputs and methodology used to produce these official estimates.

Over the past twenty years, his academic research has focused on evaluating and improving the data produced from the Census Bureau’s redesign for Census 2010, the American Community Survey (ACS). He has provided training to local and national data experts as well as students, made presentations to national public data user groups on ACS data quality and usefulness, and with David Swanson has presented findings at professional meetings and co-authored a handful of refereed journal articles. The crowning achievement of this research led to an invitation to provide expert testimony to the National Academy of Sciences on state and local government data needs related to the ACS.

Dr. Hough’s current research is focused on State Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) and their applications to applied demography. In his current position as Senior Education Research Analyst for the Education Research & Data Center for Washington State, Dr. Hough researches administrative records linking high school students to postsecondary attendance, achievement and labor force participation.

Gundula Proksch is a scholar, registered architect and Associate Professor of Architecture and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington. In her research, professional work and teaching she explores interdisciplinary practices in the built environment, novel approaches in sustainable design, and their potential to positively shape the futures of cities.

I am the Genentech Distinguished Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, working under the mentoring of Jerry Reiter. I completed my PhD in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, where my advisor was Steve Fienberg. My undergraduate studies are from the National University of Colombia, in Bogota, where I majored in statistics.

In my research I develop methodology for a variety of applied and data-driven problems. Thus far I have worked on:

1. Record linkage techniques to combine datafiles that contain information on overlapping sets of individuals but lack unique identifiers.

Nonignorable missing data modeling, and the usage of auxiliary information to identify nonignorable missing data mechanisms.

Classification techniques that output sets of plausible labels for ambiguous sample points.

I also have experience working with social network models for valued ties, and capture-recapture models in the context of human rights violations.

Dr. Park studies early childhood development and parenting in the context of culture, immigration, and public policy. In particular, she is concerned with systematically improving educational equity at all levels of early childhood education across both institutional and informal contexts of development. She seeks to understand how learning and development unfold across socioeconomically and culturally diverse ecologies and help create policies that humanize and reimagine early learning environments that reflect the hopes and priorities of historically underserved, non-dominant families and communities.

Dr. Park directs the Early childhood development, Parenting, Immigration, and Culture (EPIC) lab that integrates perspectives across education, developmental science, and public policy in pursuing three interconnected lines of research:

• Evaluating and improving early childhood system, policy, and program
• Supporting racialized Dual Language Learners (DLLs) and immigrant-origin children
• Understanding parenting and family context of early childhood development (ECD)