Archives: Affiliates

Clair Yang is an incoming junior faculty member at the Jackson School of International Studies. Her research bridges a wide range of topics in political economy, economic development, and business and politics. Her current projects study the impact of historical institutions on long-run economic development and population welfare, and the role of social networks in institutional development.

Carole Lee studies the allocation of major resources among scholars – in particular, co-authorship relationships, publication outcomes, grant awards, and scientific prizes – and their distribution across the scholarly population by gender and race. To study these, she and her collaborators have been looking at co-authorship relationships across the JSTOR corpus (by gender), grant award outcomes at the National Institutes of Health (by race), grant award outcomes at other intramural agencies (by gender, degree type, and seniority), and the awarding of scientific prizes (by gender). Her collaborators include faculty in Statistics, Information Science, Sociology, and Biology, as well as organizations such as the Center for Scientific Review at the National Institutes of Health, the Association for Women in Science, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences. The mission behind her work, as a philosopher of science, is to understand scientific practice with an eye towards improving it. Because of the practical, policy-oriented nature of her work, she is glad to have connections – through her research and service – to a number of stakeholder institutions, including the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines, NIH, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Doris Duke Foundation, and Templeton Foundation.

There are a number of ways her research connects with CSDE’s focus on Demographic Measurements and Methods. She has worked towards introducing new concepts and methods for measuring biases in the allocation of journal pages and grant dollars. In recent work, she introduced the notion of “commensuration bias” in grant and journal review, where these biases can work against not only women, racial/ethnic minorities, and junior researchers – commensuration bias can also lead other problematic patterns in publication and funding across science (Lee 2015). Along these lines, she and her collaborator Elena Erosheva (Department of Statistics) created new methods for measuring commensuration bias. In recognition of these ideas, they won First Prize in the category of Most Creative Idea for Detection of Bias in Peer Review in the Center for Scientific Review’s America COMPETES Act Challenge competition (National Institutes of Health). This work has been published in Science Advances and covered by the media, including by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Thaïsa Way is an urban landscape historian teaching history, theory, and design in the Department of Landscape Architecture, College of Built Environments and the Executive Director of Urban@UW, an initiative of the UW Office of Research in partnership with CoMotion and the eSciences Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle. Urban@UW brings scholars in urban research, teaching, and practice together to collaborate and collectively generate knowledge that will support the stewardship of healthy, sustainable, resilient, and equitable urban futures. I am honored to serve as an affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. She is also a leader on the Executive Committee for the UW Population Health Initiative and serve on the steering committee for the eSciences Institute.

Thaïsa is editor of two collections of essays on urban research as well as author of three books and four book-chapters, eleven peer-reviewed articles, seventeen essays in professional and practice publications, and numerous invited essays. She has been awarded sixteen grants for research, teaching, and publications, with a NSF/NRT collaborative grant applications currently in process. She has presented twenty refereed scholarly papers, chaired sixteen symposia and/or conference sessions, and have been invited to give over sixty lectures on four continents. Additionally, she has served as guest editor for three journal issues and as curator for three exhibits. She was also honored by the American Academy of Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture for 2016

She contributes to the CSDE’s Priority Research Area of Environments and Population through a study of human resilience and adaptation to climate change, the role of neighborhoods in conditioning human behavior, and specifically the influence of public space in the urban context. Thaïsa’s scholarship addresses issues of gender history, urban history, and resilience. While she has published scholarship in feminist histories of design, my current research is focused on urban design history, public space, and community resilience. In this area she is focused on research methods, demographic and otherwise that explore population health and wellbeing. As a historian she has done archival research. She contributes to the CSDE Priority Research Area of Demographic Measures & Methods through her collaborations in data science as it is applied to urban science. Her work with the eScience Institute has catalyzed the new urban analytics lab to build research and scholarship around urban data. It is part of a larger effort to apply big data technology and data science to critical urban questions and challenges.

Finally, Thaïsa is a teacher and mentor for undergraduates and graduate students in each of the areas in which she does scholarship: landscape architecture, architecture, history, and gender studies. Education and training of the next generation of urban researchers is critical to her and she strives to best prepare students for the complex challenges that lay ahead.

Joseph is a social welfare scholar with expertise in the demographic analysis of social service administrative data. He has published 3 peer-revised articles (with 6 more under preparation), 1 book chapter, 1 invited review, and 15 peer-reviewed conference papers. He currently directs the Data Science and Research Informatics Group (RIG) at Partners for Our Children (POC) in the University of Washington School of Social Work (SSW). The main activities of the RIG focus on two major efforts: 1. the automation and display of various demographic metrics concerning the activities of the Washington State child welfare system via the Washington State Child Well-Being Data Portal (http://pocdata.org/), and 2. more traditional research projects involving detailed analyses of specific features of the social service system in Washington and throughout the US. Joseph is also planning to establish a graduate certificate program in social service informatics within the SSW.

Jamein is a trained economist in the fields of Labor and Demography with primary interests in the economics of crime, law, and social capital. His research agenda currently consists of four large overarching themes related to institutional discrimination and access to social justice, the interaction between local governance and civil disorders, crime and criminal justice, and race and economic inequality.

Clara Berridge’s research focuses on the ethical and policy implications of digital technologies used in elder care. She studies data and information technologies, such as remote monitoring systems and social robots, as well as the surveillance incentivized by AI of older adults and care workers. Across projects, she’s often thinking about privacy, power, and decision making about technology use. Dr. Berridge has also studied positive aging paradigms and nursing home culture change. She recently developed Let’s Talk Tech, an online tool to help people living with mild dementia participate knowledgeably in decisions about technology use in their care.

Dr. Berridge is adjunct faculty in the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, core faculty in the University’s Disability Studies Program, and an affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research at Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley and an M.S.W. from the University of Washington.

In 2011, Claus C Pörtner joined Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Econmics as an Assistant Professor of Economics. He previously worked at the University of Washington, Brown University, Georgetown University, and worked as a consultant for the World Bank in Washington, DC, and Ghana. His research interests include household and population economics, development, and labor. He has published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Population Economics, and Journal of African Economies. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses focusing mainly on development and population issues.

Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar is a sociologist with interests in international migration, racial and ethnic studies, global and transnational sociology, ethnography, and service learning methods. Some of her research interests include:

• Arts administration, public policy and urban planning
• Creative economy
• Racial equity in private and public philanthropy
• Migration and families
•  Vietnam
• Asia/Asian Americans

Development Sociology, Population & Development Program. Dissertation: Husband-Wife Communication and Family Planning in Egypt

Trained as a social demographer (in part by Professor Charles Hirschman during his years at Cornell), Win Brown has worked since the early 1980s in a variety of applied public health settings, mostly in the developing world. He spent nine years as a full faculty member at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, where he taught and advised cohorts of MPH and PhD students, many of whom have succeeded in international public health and academic careers. In his current position as Senior Program Officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Family Planning Strategy, he is responsible for conceptualizing, funding, and managing grants that contribute to the global measurement agenda in family planning and reproductive health.