Archives: Affiliates

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.

Eric Roth’s research has focused on the social epidemiology of HIV/AIDS, with research in Kenya and Canada exploring the interactions between cultural patterns and disease transmission. He is the author of the text, Culture, Biology and Anthropological Demography (Cambridge, 2004), and the co-editor with Elliot Fratkin (Smith College) of the book As Pastoralists Settle: Cultural, Health and Economic Consequences of Pastoral Sedentarization in Marsabit District, Kenya (Springer-Verlag, 2006). He has published in diverse peer-reviewed journals including American Anthropologist, Human Organization, Human Ecology, Culture, Health and Sexuality, International Journal of Drug Policy, Harm Reduction Journal, Drug and Alcohol Review, Sexual Research and Social Policy, Evolution and Human Behaviour and Health, Risk and Society. One current project includes a NIH-funded Center Grant (R24) linking the University of Washington, the University of Nairobi, and the University of Victoria in social epidemiology of female sex workers and their clients in the large informal settlement, or slum, called Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya. Another, funded by NIH and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), focuses on the sexual behavior of Men Who Have Sex with Men in Vancouver, British Columbia in light of the provincial expansion of HAART. A third, funded by CIHR, will examine health consequences for HIV+ women across Canada.

Mikael Jansson’s research is focused on the health of vulnerable populations as well as on research ethics and research methods. He applies his demographic training primarily to understand life transitions of street-involved youth and low prestige service workers in Canada, the United States and Kenya. In the five years he has published four books and 10 referred articles in journals including the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Addiction, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion, Qualitative Health Research, Harm Reduction Journal, International Journal of Behavioral Development, Journal of Mental Health, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and the Journal of Adolescence. In the last five years, he has received external funding from the NIH, the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). These grants are funding three large current projects that are involved with data collection in Kenya, Victoria BC and in six sites across Canada. He just completed the data collection on a two site, four wave panel sample in Victoria, BC Canada, and Sacramento California.

Merwan Engineer’s research over the past decade has been in the areas of demographic methods and models, development economics, and social well being. His work on demographic methods involves understanding the demographics of age-group societies, societies identified in the anthropology literature as organizing themselves according to age groups. His paper “Overlapping Generations Models of Graded Age-Set Societies” (The Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics) proves the equivalency between classes of models across the disciplines.

In other modeling work, “Choosing Longevity with Overlapping Generations” (The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics) examines health and savings decisions and shows that an economy can stagnate in a “poverty trap”. In a poverty trap individuals are poor and short lived. However, if the economy starts with enough wealth, it can “take off” and future generations will eventually become wealthy and long lived. This paper reveals when the initial level of wealth matters for intergenerational health and longevity outcomes.

In work on social well being, Engineer has developed improved indices of human development. In particular, he has developed a methodological analysis of the well-known Human Development Index. He has also modified the index to take into account the quality of life. This work is published in Social Indicators Research and Indian Growth and Development Review.

Laura Cowen’s research involves the theory and applications of capture-recapture studies. It encompasses applied statistics, bayesian methods and applications, conservation ecology, ecological modeling, fisheries modelling, modeling, and statistical ecology.

Capture-recapture is interdisciplinary by nature as it is primarily used in biology and fishery studies, however it also has applications in epidemiology. She also collaborates with other scientists (ecologists, fisheries scientists, and astrophysicists) in general to work on various scientific studies.

Recently, Cowen has become the Principal Investigator for two COVID-19 research grants. One study assesses the risks of future COVID-19 outbreaks in British Columbia using mathematical and statistical modelling. The other study focuses on estimating the number of hidden COVID-19 cases.  Cowen is also Principal Investigator on a Collaborative Research Team grant funded by CANSSI looking to develop statistical methods that will integrate population data from multiple sources.

Tom Burch is Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria, with research interests in family and household demography, demographic modelling, and fertility theory. Since the early 1990s, he has been working on the relations among theory, models, and data in empirical social science, particularly demography. His interest began with the realization that computer modeling of various kinds could provide the language with which to state sociological theories in a more rigorous and usable form. His work has led to a reconceptualization of demography, in which a large part of formal demography can be viewed as theoretical, and in which many behavioral theories, often discarded as too simplistic or inconsistent with some bodies of empirical data, are rescued as perfectly sound theory. This distinction rests on abandonment of the idea (from logical positivism) that theories are true or false, and adoption of the view that a theory or model is judged to fit some portion of the real world well enough in certain respects for a specific purpose. Work on these themes also has led to publications on the teaching of demography. Prior to 1990, most of his research was in the area of household and family demography–marriage, cohabitation, divorce; household structure and dynamics; kinship.

Elizabeth (Liz) Mogford is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Western Washington University and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington. Her teaching and research are interdisciplinary, combining sociology and public health. Her research interests include the social determinants of health, critical health literacy, and critical global learning. She is a leader in WWU’s faculty led Global Learning Programs. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon from 1994-1997, where she focused on public health and gender in development, and has conducted research in India, Mexico, and Kenya. In addition to teaching and research, Liz works on advocacy and outreach for advancing global health equity. Currently this includes being a board member of Health Alliance International and the Institute for Village Studies, and an advisory board member of Just Health Action and the Western Regional Global Health Conference.

Mick Cunningham is Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. He has been at Western Washington University since 1999, and an affiliate of the University of Washington’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) since 2002.

Cunningham’s research examines the long-term influences of parents on children, the consequences of divorce, the factors shaping individuals’ attitudes about family life, and the changing roles and responsibilities of women and men in families. His research linking parental characteristics to young adult outcomes including family attitudes and well-being continues to be regularly cited in the field. In addition, he has made important contributions to the literature on the work-family nexus through his longitudinal research investigating reciprocal relationships between women’s paid and unpaid work over the life course. He has also examined changing attitudes about family and gender in a European context, with a particular focus on Northern Ireland. Cunningham has recently embarked on study of intimate partner violence with Dr. Kristin Anderson and Dr. Julie Morris of Western Washington University. They are analyzing data from the recently-released National Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Assault survey. (Note that these data are highly protected and are not housed on CSDE servers.) This research project will investigate the association between union status and experiences of intimate partner violence, and gender differences in violence exposure over the life course. Each of these projects is rooted in understanding important changes in family life in the U.S. and other countries that can be directly linked to well-being.