Archives: Affiliates

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 Blumstein-Jordan Professor Emeritus 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

 

India Ornelas’ research focuses on racial and ethnic health disparities, social determinants of health, Latino and immigrant populations, and health promotion interventions.  She conducts community-based participatory research– to identify how social and cultural factors influence health disparities in racial/ethnic minority and immigrant communities. She employs both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to obtain a richer understanding of both the causes and consequences of health disparities and design interventions. She has published on these topics in Social Science and Medicine, Annual Review of Public Health and the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. She is currently working with community partners, Casa Latina and El Centro de la Raza, to test an intervention to reduce stress and prevent depression among Latina immigrant women.

 

Professor Nurius studies processes and effects of stress and trauma focusing on vulnerable and socially disadvantaged populations, early/preventive intervention, and fostering resilience. Her research on life course stress integrates structural, psychosocial, and biobehavioral mechanisms, distinguishing direct, cumulative, and interactive effects of early and later life stress exposures alongside protective factors.  A mental health specialist, she is increasingly focusing on comorbid physical, mental, and behavioral health outcomes as well as incorporating effects of the environment (e.g., air pollution, neighborhood characteristics) in multi-level models to explain stress responding and disparities in health and functioning outcomes. She works with field associates in examining effects of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) alongside later life adversities on health, learning, and development outcomes in Washington state. She co-leads a West Coast Poverty Center Roundtable on Early Life Adversity & Poverty that convenes researchers, service providers, policy leaders and funders.

William Zumeta holds a joint appointment as professor in the College of Education. He served as associate dean of the Evans School from 2001-05 and acting dean from March-August, 1988. He has been faculty coordinator for the Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management program since 2008. He is also co-director of the Collaborative Researchers in Education Sciences Training (CREST) program, an interdepartmental Ph.D. training program supported by the U.S. Department of Education. He was the recipient of the Graduate Dean’s Award in 2010-11 for service to graduate education at the University of Washington.

Zumeta teaches in the areas of policy analysis and public policies toward higher education and education and the workforce. His research interests focus on higher education policy including accountability; finance; graduate education and academic research policies; public policies affecting private higher education; and education and workforce policies. He was a senior fellow of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education from 2005-2011 and has been a fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute since 2008. He was president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, a national scholarly organization, in 2009-10.

Professor Zumeta’s research has been supported by a wide range of government agencies, foundations, and national groups. He previously taught at the University of British Columbia, University of California, Los Angeles, and the Claremont Graduate University, and worked for the City Council of Philadelphia and the California State Department of Finance.

Zumeta holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and a MPP from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a BA in Political Science from Haverford College.

Emily Williams is an addictions health services and disparities researcher and an implementation scientist. She holds a joint appointment as a Professor of Health Services and Director of the Doctoral Program in Health Services at the University of Washington and a core investigator and co-director of the post-doctoral fellowship at the Denver-Seattle Center of Innovation for Veteran-Centered Value-Driven Care at VA Puget Sound Health Services Research & Development (HSR&D). She has longstanding interests in health behavior and the mechanisms (both societal- and healthcare-level) that help drive behavior change, particularly as these relate to vulnerable populations and stigmatized conditions. Her research is specifically focused on increasing access to evidence-based treatments for unhealthy alcohol and other substance use in diverse medical settings, including understanding and promoting equity in this care for vulnerable patient subpopulations (e.g., those with HIV and HCV, racial/ethnic minorities, persons living in rural areas, transgender patients, and women). She currently leads research focused on understanding patterns of alcohol use and care across transgender status, tailoring and testing practice facilitation to implement evidence-based alcohol-related care in hepatology clinics, and increasing access to evidence-based treatment for opioid use disorders in primary care.