Archives: Affiliates

Dr. Guttmannova is interested in the prevention of child and adolescent substance use and behavior problems, the risk and protective framework in the etiology of substance use, and the role of context including social policy, culture, immigration, and poverty in healthy development across the life course.

Mary Kay Gugerty is the Nancy Bell Evans Professor of Nonprofit Management and the Faculty Director of the Nancy Bell Evans Center on Nonprofits & Philanthropy at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington. She is also the Principal Investigator for the International Program in Public Health Leadership.

Her research examines evaluation and impact measurement in the social sector; advocacy, accountability and voluntary regulation programs among nonprofit and NGOs; and community-based organizations and rural development in sub-Saharan Africa.

Gugerty’s recent book, The Goldilocks Challenge: Right-Sized Evaluation and Monitoring for Social Sector Organizations is co-authored with Dean Karlan and published by Oxford University Press. Gugerty is also the lead editor of Voluntary Regulation of Nonprofit and Nongovernmental Organizations: An Accountability Club Framework, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 and co-edited with Aseem Prakash and co-editor of Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action, also with Aseem Prakash and published by Cambridge University Press.

Gugerty’s research also explores issues in rural development and community development institutions in Africa. Current work examines the impact of women’s participation in agricultural self-help groups on household decision-making and agricultural production.

James Gregory is a professor of History and the Harry Bridges Chair and Director of the Center for Labor Studies. His research examines issues of migration, race, radicalism, and labor in the United States. He is the author of numerous articles and essays and two prize winning books on internal migration: The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migration of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (2005) and American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (1989).

Current projects include two studies of American radicalism: (1) Upton Sinclair, the EPIC Movement, and the Twilight of American Socialism that traces a critical turn in the organizational and electoral prospects of the American Left; (2) Red Seattle: Radical Generations from the Knights of Labor to the WTO that explores the challenges of continuity and socialization faced by the American left in the 20th century. Also ongoing is the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, an online public history project that explores the long history of segregation and civil rights activism in the Pacific Northwest.

Amelia Gavin’s primary research examines the etiological pathways to preterm birth and low birth weight from a life-course perspective. She also studies the social, structural, and cultural contexts associated with different health outcomes, especially among racial and ethnic groups. She has published in a wide range of journals including Psychological Medicine, General Hospital Psychiatry, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, American Journal of Public Health, Archives of General Psychiatry, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Prevention Science, Obstetrics & Gynecology, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Journal of Women’s Health, and Public Health Reports. In 2005, Dr. Gavin received a five-year NIH clinical training grant award to fund the Depression and Anxiety in Pregnancy Study. The study is designed to address unanswered questions about the prevalence and course of perinatal depressive and panic disorders and the impact of antenatal major depression on pregnancy outcomes. To accomplish these research objectives, a quality improvement project was implemented at the Maternal and Infant Care Center (MICC) at the University of Washington Medical Center to screen women for major depressive disorder, panic disorder, and psychosocial stress during the perinatal period. The screening is conducted by clinic staff at three different times during the course of care – twice during pregnancy (16 weeks and 36 weeks) and at the 6-week postpartum appointment. To date, over 4,800 women have been screened for probable major depressive disorder and probable panic disorder through this study.

Karin Frey is a Research Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the College of Education. Her research focuses on revenge, reconciliation, sociomoral identity and the development of caregiving in adolescence. She is the PI of a study that examines how African American, European American, Indigenous American and Mexican American youth learn about themselves when they avenge a victimized peer or take actions that resolve the situation. Contextual influences such as perceived cultural norms and institutional justice are examined as contributors to actions, thoughts and emotions. Complementary samples of European Americans from Alabama, Chinese Canadians and Pakistani Canadians are also being collected to assure representation from different types of honor, face, and dignity cultures.

Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen’s primary area of scholarship focuses on the intersection of health disparities, aging and care giving in marginalized communities. Currently, as the Principal Investigator of the National Health, Aging and Sexuality Study: Caring and Aging with Pride over Time (R01), she is leading the first national longitudinal study on health disparities of LGBT midlife and older adults and their caregivers.

Brian Flaherty’s research has focused on categorical and longitudinal statistical models, measurement and psychometrics, developmental theory and methods, substance use and dependence, and classification and cluster analysis, with particular attention paid to applied statistics in combination with tobacco and other substance use. Specifically, he has been examining the use of categorical latent variable models as measurement models for sub-populations. Within the context of tobacco use, for example, his work has examined how smoking patterns vary across demographic groups, such as age, race and gender. This work is motivated simultaneously by substantive and methodological research questions. He has published on these topics in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Addiction, American Journal of Public Health and Developmental Psychology.

Ben Fitzhugh’s research over the past decade has focused on human biogeography, demographic history (paleodemography), human-environmental interaction, maritime subsistence ecology, and climate change, all from a deep-time/archaeological perspective. Through his career, his interests have been focused on human-environmental dynamics in the Holocene history of the North Pacific from Alaska to Japan. Fitzhugh’s research examines the interrelationships of human-natural ecological co-evolution in the context of relatively insular geographies and geologically, oceanographically, and climatically dynamic environments. In recent years, this work includes tracking population trends as a baseline for understanding the causal factors underlying long term cultural changes in these regions. In the last decade, he and co-authors have published on these and related topics in journals such as American Anthropologist; Geoarchaeology; Journal of Archaeological Science; Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports; Quaternary International; Quaternary Research; and World Archaeology as well as in chapters of peer reviewed volumes, including the 2020 Smithsonian Scholarly Press volume “Arctic Crashes: People and Animals in a Changing North” (Krupnik and Crowell, eds). Fitzhugh’s “Kuril Island Biocomplexity Project” (KBP) formally concluded in 2012, but the large, 7-year, international and interdisciplinary project continues to generate new results and publications. This project includes archaeologists, geologists, paleoecologists, oceanographers, climatologists, and modelers from the US, Russia, and Japan. That project spawned a number of expanded research network collaborations created to compare case studies and share lessons on long-term human-environmental dynamics across the North Pacific from the Kurils to Alaska, and ultimately between the subarctic Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic Ocean Basins.  In 2014, Fitzhugh co-founded the Paleoecology of Subarctic and Arctic Seas (PESAS) working group. PESAS brings together paleo- climate scientists, oceanographers, fisheries and marine ecologists, archaeologists and historians to better understand changes to the subarctic and Arctic coupled human-marine ecosystem over century to millennial time scales. In 2018, PESAS joined forces with the global Oceans Past Initiative (oceanspast.org), a group centered on marine environmental history, archaeology, marine paleo-ecology and policy studies. PESAS members are currently planning a 5-year effort to bring together marine paleo-ecologists and neo-ecologists to explore and improve methods for integrating paleo and neo ecological data sets together to better incorporate the lessons of long-term change for contemporary policy and management. In addition to continuing to work to unite natural science, social science and humanities research of the past throughout subarctic and Arctic regions, Dr. Fitzhugh’s Lab recently returned to the Kodiak Archipelago to expand on community-based archaeological research he started in the 1990s, this time with a focus on the experiences of Indigenous communities under Russian contact/colonialism. Inspired by student Hollis Miller’s dissertation goals, the new project expands Fitzhugh’s earlier research into the Russian contact/colonial period and facilitating greater research continuity from the deep past (7000 years ago) to the present.

Betsy Evans’ research is concentrated in two (closely connected) areas of sociolinguistics: the attitudes to and perceptions of language variation (i.e. perceptions of whether and how language varies) and the perceptions of spatial distribution of variation in language, known as perceptual dialectology. Her work on perceptions of varieties of English explores the affective values attributed to language varieties, revealing speakers’ beliefs about both language and society. Perceptions and attitudes to different varieties of English can be a crucial component of the linguistic description and analysis of a language. Her research on perceptions of English in Washington state addresses two issues regarding perceptions of the spatial distribution of language variation. Namely, it answers questions about what perceptions residents of WA have of the English spoken there, and it responds to methodological gaps in perceptual dialectology through the use of new technology such as Geographic Information Systems for data analysis (results from this ‘Seattle to Spokane’ project can be seen here: http://depts.washington.edu/folkling/ ). The importance of geographical space and the spatial distribution of language variation has become increasingly more important as a relevant analytic category in sociolinguistics. Space is under-theorized in linguistics and understanding space as an extra-linguistic variable is an important direction for sociolinguistics.

Sarah Elwood’s research intersects relational poverty studies, critical GIScience and digital geographies, visual politics and mixed methods, and urban geography. Her current research and writing focus on creative activisms and visual politics that intervene in the shelter crisis; feminist, queer and critical race theorizations of digital geographies; and a collaborative book project, “Abolishing Poverty: Towards Pluriverse Politics and Futures”. With Vicky Lawson, she co-directs the Relational Poverty Network (RPN), a transnational interdisciplinary community of scholars and activists.  The Relational Poverty Network is a collaborative network of over 300 members focused on conceptual and methodological innovations in poverty research and education. Originally funded by an NSF Research Coordination Network grant (2013-18), the RPN convenes an international community of scholars, teachers, policy makers and activists working within and beyond academia, to develop conceptual frameworks, research methodologies, and pedagogies that challenge impoverishment and inequality. Relational poverty studies i) shifts from thinking about ‘the poor and poor others’ to relationships of power and privilege, ii) works across boundaries to foster a transnational, comparative and interdisciplinary approach to poverty research, iii) involves multidirectional theory building that incorporates marginalized voices to build innovative concepts for poverty research.