Archives: Affiliates

I am a biological anthropologist investigating evolutionary and ecological influences on growth and development, and the implications of those relationships for public health. My research, conducted with two indigenous populations—the Tsimane of Bolivia and the Qom/Toba of Argentina—combines field research (focal follows, ethnographic observations, interviews) with laboratory analysis of non-invasive biomarkers and mixed-modeling approaches. My specific investigative questions have been informed by two related tenets of evolutionary biology relevant to human health: (1) that nutritional and ecological conditions in early life can influence metabolic, immunological, and reproductive responses to stimuli in later life, and (2) that many non-communicable diseases result from a mismatch between a people’s current environments, developmental calibrations to environments in early life, and our evolved biology and life history. In working with the Tsimane and the Qom, I am able to study health outcomes in relation to certain behavioral and ecological factors that are more representative of conditions during much of human ancestry—e.g. universal and prolonged breastfeeding, ubiquitous microbial exposure, high infectious disease burdens, early reproduction, and high fertility. At the same time, these study populations are experiencing rapid environmental and social changes affecting developmental and health outcomes across the life course, with broader implications for global health.

Emmanuela Gakidou, MSc, PhD, is Professor of Health Metrics Sciences and Senior Director of Organizational Development and Training at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. She is also a Faculty Affiliate for the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences at the University of Washington.

Dr. Gakidou’s research interests focus on impact evaluation, methods, and tools development for analytical challenges in global health. Examples of current research projects include the evaluation of community-based interventions to improve non-communicable disease management in underserved populations, the assessment of facility efficiency in the provision of health services, and the measurement of poverty and educational attainment at the small area level.

A founding member of IHME, Dr. Gakidou oversees the Organizational Development and Training team as they strengthen and support our high-achieving, diverse, and ambitious staff. She is passionate about training the next generation of leaders in the field of health metrics and evaluation both at the University of Washington and around the world, and enjoys mentoring and teaching.

Before joining IHME, Dr. Gakidou was a research associate at the Harvard Initiative for Global Health and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Prior to moving to Harvard University, Dr. Gakidou worked as a health economist at the World Health Organization (WHO), where she led work on the measurement of health inequalities.

Originally from Greece, Dr. Gakidou moved to the US for higher education and received her degrees – a BA, a Master of International Health Economics, and a PhD in Health Policy – from Harvard University.

IHME was established at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2007. Its mission is to improve health through better health evidence.

Andrew Foster is a visiting Professor from Brown University where he is a Professor of Economics, Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice, and Director of the Population Studies and Training Center.  He is an empirical microeconomist with interests in the areas of population, environment, development, and health. Recent work has examined economic growth in rural India, exploring such issues as growth in the non-farm economy, the effects of local democratization, groundwater usage, forest cover, household structure, inequality, and schooling. He also is exploring the effects of recent changes in air quality in Delhi. Foster also has a series of projects with colleagues in the Center for Gerentology examining the market for nursing home care.

Himanshu Grover has a broad background in urban planning, community resilience, spatial analytics, social equity analysis, risk perception, and hazard mitigation. He has significant training and expertise in ethnographic and survey research and secondary data analysis on risk perception to natural hazards, policy impact analysis, and social vulnerability assessments. Himanshu’s research interests lie at the intersection of ecological sustainability, local development policies, and community resilience.

Throughout his career, David Swanson has concentrated on applied demography while also keeping up with academic demography. He served on the U. S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee for six years and chaired the group for two years (2004-10, 2009-10). He also has served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Demographic Association (1995-7 and 2003-7); and the editor of Population Research and Policy Review (2004-7).

Swanson has produced over 100 refereed sole- and co-authored journal articles and nine books, mainly dealing with demography, especially methods for doing small area estimation and forecasting. He also has edited or co-edited four additional books and Google Scholar shows more than 5,500 citations to his work. During the Spring and summer of 2020, Swanson wrote 20 articles on the COVID-19 Pandemic for Northwest Citizen. With Peter Morrison, he wrote “Sanctuary Cities Get a Census Bonus,” an op-ed piece that appears in the 16 July 2019 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to being a Fulbright specialist in Demography, he has received two Fulbright awards and more than $2.3 million in grants and contracts. Among other professional recognitions, he: (1) served as a “summer at census” scholar in June, 2019, U.S. Census Bureau; (2) received the Terrie award in 1999 and again in 2016 for presenting the best paper in state and local demography at the annual conference of the Southern Demographic Association; and (3) received a Vice-Presidential “Hammer Award” in 1998 for work on the development of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.  In addition to UC Riverside,  other positions he has held include serving as a course developer and an instructor for the Penn State online MPS degree in Applied Demography. In the Fall of 2018, he was visiting professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.

Janelle Taylor is a medical anthropologist, trained in sociocultural anthropology and ethnographic methods. Over the past ten years, her interest in social and cultural dimensions of health and medicine has come to focus more specifically on aging, dementia, and caregiving. This has led her to engage more closely with demographic approaches to questions such as population aging, migration patterns of the eldercare workforce, and shifting patterns of family and residence as these affect eldercare needs and resources.

Ott Toomet’s primary research interests are in methods and statistics, migration, and networks. Much of this work is central to demography, including his collaboration with Josh Blumenstock. Together, they are using large-scale network data to model the determinants of ethnic segregation.

Dr. Dan Goldhaber is the Director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR) and an Affiliate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. He is also the Director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) and a Vice-President at American Institutes of Research (AIR). Dan previously served as an elected member of the Alexandria City School Board from 1997-2002, as an Associate Editor of Economics of Education Review and an editor of Education Finance and Policy.

Dan’s work focuses on issues of educational productivity and reform at the K-12 level, the broad array of human capital policies that influence the composition, distribution, and quality of teachers in the workforce, and connections between students’ K-12 experiences and postsecondary outcomes. Topics of published work in this area include studies of the stability of value-added measures of teachers, the effects of teacher qualifications and quality on student achievement, and the impact of teacher pay structure and licensure on the teacher labor market. Previous work has covered topics such as the relative efficiency of public and private schools, and the effects of accountability systems and market competition on K-12 schooling.

Elena Erosheva’s research focuses on the development and application of modern statistical methods to address important issues in the social sciences, broadly defined. As a statistical methodologist, she works in the area of multivariate and longitudinal data analysis (e.g., mixed membership and latent variable modeling). In collaboration with students and colleagues, she has developed a number of mixed membership model extensions that received a range of applications. For example, incorporating deterministic mixture components in mixed membership models has proved to be useful for describing the structure of functional disability in the U.S. population of elderly persons, for analyzing biomedical data from diagnostic tests in the absence of gold standard, and for analyzing public policy priorities from survey data. Likewise, using National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS) data to study disability trends in the U.S., she has developed group-based latent class transition models that account for rolling enrollment and differential drop-out, critical design features of the NLTCS. The corresponding analysis has confirmed that functional disability among the elderly population in the U.S. has declined from 1984 to 1999 and also found that, contrary to the mainstream opinion, this trend has reversed itself from 1999 to 2004. As another example of her research, in collaboration with CSDE affiliate Ross Matsueda, she has developed a hierarchical Bayesian curve registration framework for modeling longitudinal behavioral data such as observations from various types of individual crime trajectories. She has also worked on a project that focuses on developing a framework for assessing feasibility of Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) in collaboration with Mark Handcock. This project develops simulation studies that can shed light on the question of whether RDS studies are warranted for a specific population.