Archives: Affiliates

Haidong Wang’s research interests are formal demographic methods, specifically mortality estimation and forecasting, as well as population health. Haidong worked on smoking and mortality in the United States; mortality forecasting methods; intergenerational transfer and its effect on the health of the elderly; and the interaction between physical activities and mental health status of the elderly in the United States. Haidong’s recent research has been focused on formal demographic methods on mortality estimation. He has worked on the estimations of child and adult mortality for the Global Burden of Diseases 2010 project, results of which have been published in three separate articles in Lancet in the past two years. Haidong has also been working on developing a new model life table system. The new model utilizes more recent empirical life tables and especially those affected by HIV/AIDS epidemic. The availability of these life tables enables me to integrate the estimation of the impacts of HIV/AIDS on the age pattern of mortality into the new model life table system. The manuscript of this project is currently under review.

Karina Walters researches American Indian and Alaska Native health, mental health, alcohol and substance abuse, and other wellness areas. She also studies multicultural social work practice identity as well as enculturation and cultural factors that buffer the effect of historical trauma, discrimination, and other forms of trauma and violence on indigenous wellness outcomes.

Jonathan Wakefield’s primary research area is in the development of methods for spatial epidemiology with a particular interest in sources of, and methods for the removal of, ecological bias. He studies Bayesian data analysis, statistical methods in epidemiology, spatial epidemiology, and pharmacodynamic models. This interest began when he was the head of the Statistics group within the Small Area Health Statistics Unit at Imperial College. This government funded unit carried out investigations using routinely collected cancer data in the United Kingdom, primarily to determine the role of the environment. Wakefield has worked in study design with a series of papers developing a case-control within ecological design which is both powerful and removes ecological bias via the judicial choice of cases and controls. In a similar vein, two-phase methods have also been applied in the spatial context. A different endeavor is cluster detection (surveillance) with Wakefield and Albert Kim (a recent graduate student in the Statistics department) developing a Bayesian method that overcomes many of the drawbacks of frequentist methods (multiple testing and inability to discuss more than one cluster in a dataset). More recently, Wakefield has been working on infectious disease data, specifically data on malaria and hand, foot and mouth disease. The website http://faculty.washington.edu/jonno/spatialepi.html contains details on Wakefield’s work in spatial epidemiology.

Jacob Vigdor is a Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. He has maintained a program of active research in subjects related to population studies–spanning economics, education, immigration and ethnicity, political economy, and race and inequality–since receiving graduate training at Harvard 1994-1999. His program of research has resulted in widely-cited peer-reviewed articles on residential segregation, immigration, and educational disparities across demographic groups. Vigdor’s 2010 book manuscript on immigration (From Immigrants to Americans) received the IPUMS research award from the Minnesota Population Center. While on the faculty at Duke University (1999-2014), he was a faculty affiliate of the Duke Population Research Institute and served as the director of Duke’s PhD program in public policy for four years. As director of the Seattle Minimum Wage Study he is leading a multi-disciplinary, multi-method effort to infer the impact of the City’s minimum wage ordinance on population-level labor market indicators and household well-being.

Katherine Stovel’s research over the past decade has brought a variety of techniques for the analysis of temporal and social network data to the study of population-related processes including migration, social networks, career structures, and adolescent health. She has published on these topics in the American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Methods and Research, the American Journal of Public Health, Social Forces, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, the Annual Review of Political Science, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While in graduate school, Stovel was involved in the early design and initial data collection of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), and has used these data in her subsequent research. Notably, she is a co-author of “Chains of Affection,” an award winning paper on the structure of adolescent sexual networks (Bearman, Moody and Stovel 2004). More recently, she has written on the long-term effects of early condom use on subsequent sexual behavior, and has developed simulation methods to explore the consequences of social network structure on labor market processes.

K. Warner Schaie’s research over the past half century has been devoted to studying cognitive development over the adult lifespan, specifically the developmental concomitants of behavioral rigidity. In this context, he has developed methodologies to differentiate between individuals’ age differences (cohort effects) from within individuals’ (maturational) age changes. He has also investigated the developmental influences, as well as the biological and environmental influences that affect adult intelligence. Much of this work has been done in the context of the Seattle Longitudinal Study {SLS) which has studied the cognitive aging of over 5000 individuals since 1956. With his co-investigator Dr. Sherry Williis, Schaie has also investigated cognitive intervention to slowing behavioral aging and most recently has used neuroi-maging approaches to study brain-behavior interrelationships. Schaie has extended his study into the investigation of inter-generational differences and trajectories in adult cognition, by studying children, grandchildren and siblings of the original SLS participants. In addition to over 300 papers and/or book chapters in the scientific he has also published several scientific monographs on the findings of his studies. The second revised edition of Developmental Influences: The Seattle Longitudinal Study is now in press to be published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The Seattle Longitudinal Study maintains a website with a public access data set and study publications in pdf at www.uwpsychiatry.org.

Elaina Rose is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on labor economics, economics of the family, and the economics of gender. Her earlier work examined the effect of economic conditions on excess female mortality in India. She has written several papers on the effect of child gender on numerous aspects of household behavior in both India and the United States. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have funded her research on the relationship between parenthood and labor market outcomes and on shifts in marriage patterns in recent decades. Her work on family economics has been widely cited in major international media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Independent, Le Figaro and CNN, and she has been interviewed by BBC England, Scotland, Wales, and World Service. Her current research interests include the relationship between family background and military service and the effect of child health on subsequent fertility. She teaches Labor Economics, Economics of Gender and Econometrics. Dr. Rose is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Women Studies and an affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences and the South Asia Center. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993.

Adrian E. Raftery is the Boeing International Professor of Statistics and Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. He works on the development of new statistical methods for the social, environmental and health sciences. An elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, he was identified as the world’s most cited researcher in mathematics for the decade 1995-2005 by Thomson-ISI. He has supervised 29 Ph.D. graduates, of whom 21 hold or have held tenure-track university faculty positions.

Visit this link to view Adrian Raferty’s sociology and demography publications.

 

Daniel Promislow’s lab focuses on the biology of aging, using theoretical, computational, experimental and comparative approaches. While this focus has led him to study a diverse set of questions, the key demographic traits of age-specific mortality and reproduction play a central role in all of this work. The Promislow group is interested in how patterns of selection shape and are shaped by these demographic parameters. Using a systems biology approach, they study high-dimensional molecular features as a bridge linking upstream genetic and environmental variation to downstream phenotype variation. In addition to lab-based work in the fruit fly, Promislow is the Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the NIH-funded Dog Aging Project, a nationwide open-data citizen science study of aging and age-related diseases in tens of thousands of companion dogs.

As an urban poverty ethnographer, Dr. Pittman’s research focuses primarily on social policy; carework; health disparities; aging; race, class, and gender; and more. Specifically, she examines the coping experiences of socially marginalized women, including Black women living with HIV/AIDS and low-income, urban Black grandmothers caring for their grandchildren. She is currently focusing on three distinct but interrelated aspects of grandparent caregiving: (1) Her forthcoming book, Coerced Mothering: Caregiving and African American Grandmothers examines the coercive forces that compel grandmothers to provide care under the harshest conditions and affiliated questions concerning individual coping responses, institutional and familial barriers and resources; (2) recent manuscripts investigate the structural lag between grandparent-headed households and safety net programs; and (3) a mixed methods project utilizing qualitative and biomarker methodologies examines the stress-mediated health impacts of low-income, African American grandmothers raising their grandchildren. This innovative design approach offers the potential for clarifying the sequence events from stressors to health markers, deepening understandings of the sources and mechanisms leading to health disparities, and for differentiating between person comparisons from within-person variations in response to stressors.

Dr. Pittman’s latest article, How Well Does the “Safety Net” Work for Family Safety Nets? Economic Survival Strategies among Grandmother Caregivers in Severe Deprivation can be found here:

http://rsf-prod.literatumonline.com/doi/full/10.7758/RSF.2015.1.1.05