Archives: Affiliates

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.

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.

Raoul Liévanos’ population studies research interests are in spatial demography, environmental inequality, disaster vulnerability, social disparities in food insecurity, residential segregation, individual- and neighborhood-level correlates of residential mortgage lending patterns, neighborhood change, geographic information systems, and spatial pattern analysis.

Julie Kmec’s research over the past decade has been devoted to gender and race/ethnic labor market inequality, work organizations, workplace diversity, and social stratification–specifically, addressing how the practices of work organizations shape the context of work for workers and for the firms that employ them. In the last decade she has published on these topics in American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, Work & Occupations, Social Science Research, and Gender & Society. She currently has two specific projects underway. The first with collaborator, Beth Hirsh, University of British Columbia-Vancouver, examines the connection between organizational human resource practices, formal complaints over discrimination, and race/sex segregation over time among U.S. work establishments. The second project examines the connection between parenthood and the labor market. Kmec has shed light on the mechanisms driving motherhood wage penalties and fatherhood wage bonuses. Using funding from WSU’s NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant, Kmec has studied the work behaviors of mothers, fathers, and non-parents in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and on-STEM fields, assessing whether cultural expectations of the “ideal” worker and the “ideal” mother and the different views of parenthood and job compatibility for women and men have implications for the productivity and job rewards of mothers and fathers in academia.

Zheng Wu is Professor of Gerontology and Canada Research Chair in Aging and Health at Simon Fraser University. He is also affiliated with University of Victoria’s Institute on Aging & Lifelong Health and Xi’an Jiaotong University’s Institute Population and Development Studies. His research interests reach across numerous aging-demographic topics, with long-standing interest in family demography. His current research program is concerned with trends and patterns of aging population in Canada, focusing on union formation and dissolution in later life, and physical and psychological wellbeing of older adults.