Archives: Affiliates

Steven Goodreau’s research has two related themes: how does the complex biobehavioral ecology of HIV produce disparities in disease burden within and between populations; and how can we make more statistically sound use of social network data to understand the structure of populations and the flow of infections or other entities within them? Since joining the UW faculty seven years ago, he has published on these topics in Demography, AIDS, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Genetics, Social Networks, the Journal of Infectious Disease, AIDS and Behavior, and eight others. Goodreau currently has five ongoing projects. The first, part of NIH’s Modeling Prevention Packages Program (MP3), aims to identify ways to better package and target HIV prevention interventions for men who have sex with men (MSM) in the Americas. Within this large multidisciplinary team, Goodreau is director of the modeling group, which is analyzing data on sexual behavior, demography, testing, and treatment among MSM in the US, Peru and Brazil; and using these data to parameterize dynamic HIV transmission network models to explore the potential impact of a host of biological and behavioral intervention packages. The second project, funded by the Gates Foundation, entails extending this analysis to MSM in India and Kenya, to begin developing a more refined comparative understanding of the nature of MSM HIV epidemics globally. The third project, Metromates, integrates behavioral data on post-HIV-diagnosis behavior change among MSM with virological data on acute infection into network models to explore the potential impact of different HIV testing strategies on reduction in risk behavior at the point when men are most infectious. The fourth project, just beginning, extends the work that the Social Network Modeling Group (also including Martina Morris at UW; Mark Handcock at UCLA, Carter Butts at UC-Irvine, and Dave Hunter at Penn State) have done over the past decade on developing user-friendly statistically grounded models and tools for social network analysis. The group’s current R packages (www.statnetproject.org) will be expanded to incorporate additional dynamics, forms of missing data, and epidemic modeling tools; the project also has a strong emphasis on providing training in these tools. The final project, A Kenya Free of AIDS (Martina Morris, PI), is a capacity-building grant for HIV prevention in Kenya; Goodreau’s role is to train African scholars in epidemic modeling so as to be better consumers of the literature that plays a major role in determining prevention and care priorities in sub-Saharan Africa, using a variety of novel pedagogical approaches that he and Dr. Morris have developed.

Robert Plotnick has pursued a broad line of research on issues at the intersection of family demography and U.S. poverty. One set of studies examined the determinants of non-marital childbearing and it relationship to child support enforcement, young women’s human capital, and adolescent expectations and desires about marriage and parenthood. These studies appeared in the Journal of Labor Economics, American Sociological Review, Journal of Family Issues, Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Family Planning Perspectives, the Journal of Adolescence and Journal of Marriage and the Family. His analysis of the trends and causes of poverty and the effects of antipoverty policies appeared in Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Poverty. Related earlier work appeared in Progress Against Poverty: A Review of the 1964-1974 Decade, Journal of Economic Literature, Social Service Review, Public Policy, Policy Studies Journal and The Child Welfare Challenge: Policy, Practice and Research, a textbook for courses in child welfare. His study of whether children from welfare families obtain less schooling appeared in Demography. His study (with Jennifer Romich and Matthew Dunbar) of highway tolls’ financial impact on low-income families appeared in the Journal of Urban Affairs. Plotnick was the lead editor of Old Assumptions, New Realities: Ensuring Economic Security for Working Families in the 21st Century, published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2011. The book argues that the demographic and economic assumptions that underlay the core U.S. welfare state programs adopted 40 to 75 years ago do not mirror the current realities of the labor market, family structure, and family behavior that today’s working families face. The chapters draw on this premise to re-evaluate existing social welfare programs and consider new policies that could better promote economic security for today’s working families. His most recent research, in collaboration with members of the Seattle Minimum Wage Study, examines the effect of Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance on labor market outcomes.

Jennie Romich is a Professor of Social Welfare at the UW School of Social Work and faculty director of the West Coast Poverty Center. She studies resources and economic well-being in families with an emphasis on low-income workers, household budgets, and families’ interactions with public policy. Her recent projects include research into effective marginal tax rates created by means-tested benefit schedules and the tax system; an investigation of income of families involved with the child welfare system; and mixed-method evaluations of the Seattle Paid Safe and Sick Time Ordinance and $15 minimum wage.  She co-leads the national effort on “Reducing Extreme Economic Inequality” for the American Academy of Social Work & Social Welfare’s Grand Challenges Initiative and co-chairs a national research network on “Poverty, Employment, and Self-Sufficiency” through the Collaborative of U.S. Poverty Centers.

Throughout her career, Bettina Shell-Duncan has been conducting mixed method biocultural research on maternal and child health in sub-Saharan Africa. Her earlier research focus was on nutrition, immunity and morbidity among nomadic children in Kenya, the health effects of settlement of former nomads. More recently, her research has focuses on the study of female genital cutting (FGC). She has examined the cultural context and health consequences of FGC among Rendille women in northern Kenya, as well as debates over medicalization of the practice. Through her work with WHO and UNICEF, Bettina has examined the politics of the international campaign to end FGC, and the implication of adopting a health and human rights framework. She has recently been conducting mixed method research on the theoretical and empirical dimensions of the dynamics of behavior change with respect to FGC in Senegal and The Gambia. This work examines the outcome of various strategies aimed at ending FGC, such as legislation and various community-based interventions, and evaluates their correspondence with leading theories of behavior change. She has recently become involved in an international research consortium, funded for 5 years by the U.K.’s Department of International Development, that will investigate factors influencing decision-making regarding FGC and intervention strategies in 6 African countries.

Aimée Dechter’s research interests span demography, sociology of the life course and the family, inequality, and methods and statistics. Her work generally focuses on the interrelationships of family, gender, work and income, and the methodological problems that arise when analyzing non-experimental data.

Aimée is also an Affiliate of the West Coast Poverty Center.

James Anderson’s research focuses on models of ecological and biological processes from a mechanistic perspective, specifically: (1) migration of organisms, (2) decision processes, and mortality processes. For three decades he has studied the effects of hydrosystems and water resource allocations on salmon and other fish species. He has developed computer models of the migration of juvenile and adult salmon through hydrosystems and heads the DART website, an internet database serving real-time environmental and fisheries data on the Columbia River. His other research interests include mathematical studies in ecosystems, biodemography, decision processes and animal behavior. He has served on a number of regional and national panels and has testified numerous times before Congress on the impacts of hydrosystems on fisheries resources. Anderson contributions to CSDE involve the development of models of mortality based on the loss of vitality through intrinsic ageing and extrinsic environmental challenges. Key works are published in Theoretical Population Biology, American Naturalist, Ecological Monographs,  Demography and Population Studies.

Prior to arriving at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington, Seattle, Scott Allard was an affiliate of the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago. His expertise in social policy bridges a wide range of topic areas, with particular emphasis on issues of poverty, place, and safety net policy in America. Scott received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1999 with concentration in American politics, public policy, the American welfare state, and quantitative methods. Throughout his career, he has been embedded in multi-disciplinary research centers, which has allowed him to develop a broad conceptual and methodological toolkit to interrogate relationships between place, poverty, and safety net assistance in the American context.

Leigh Anderson joined the Evans School faculty in 1997. She previously taught for eight years at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She has also taught or been a visiting researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan, Renmin University of China in Beijing, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. Her primary research interest is in explaining how changes in traditional economic constraints affect individual behavior, but also how formal and informal institutions, intra-household dynamics, and cognitive limitations lead to outcomes different from those predicted by a simple model of utility maximization.

Katie Baird’s research examines the ways in which the U.S.’s educational system results in unequal opportunities for youth based on their socioeconomic background. Recent research has examined the historical foundations of educational governance in the US, placing this within a comparative perspective. This is important because educational reforms that fail to consider institutional features of our educational system can lead to misjudging reasons why it performs so poorly. Some of her research examines some unintended consequences of reform, arguing that they often serve to reinforce rather than undo the features that perpetuate inequality. Dr. Baird has also embarked on several projects investigating the distributional burden of health care financing in the US. More recently she has joined other researchers to investigate the impact that drop boxes have on voting turnout. 

Betty Bekemeier is a public health systems and services researcher with collaborative research underway with public health partners nationwide. Her research is focused on determining the impact of local public health department services and activities on the reduction of health disparities, in order to direct policy and practice in terms of “what works,” “for whom,” and “under what conditions” in local public health practice. She is a founding member of Washington State’s (WA) Public Health Practice-based Research Network (PBRN)—one of 12 state-wide Public Health PBRN research collaboratives made up of state and local public health practice leaders and researchers focused on answering questions of specific significance to practice and bridging the research translation “disconnect” between studies not easily translated to practice and the under-studied research needs of practitioners. She is PI of the Public Health Activities and Services Tracking (PHAST) study—the first national multi-state Public Health PBRN study—and is working with 10 PBRN states to understand the nature of local public health system service variation and change. The RWJF-funded PHAST study has been officially underway since only September 2010, but has already generated 4 additional, separately-funded projects and 2 other pending proposed studies. By working through and with PBRN partners, the PHAST study team has access to and is compiling annual data specific to amounts and types of local public health services provided per health department per county. These types of data have never been previously obtainable and examined and studies estimating the impact of local health department services on population health and other outcomes have, therefore, been very difficult otherwise to conduct. Betty and the PHAST team have developed strong relationships with national practice partners, established operational procedures for a growing relational data base, processed related data documentation and histories, and are conducting preliminary analyses regarding the variation in distribution of maternal/child health services provided by health departments and relative to local “need.” Betty has also published studies she has conducted regarding the associations of types of local public health services with disparities in county-level racial mortality.