Archives: Affiliates

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.

Mark Ellis’s research interests include gender, race and employment, immigration, and residential segregation. His work over the past decade has been devoted to answering two broad but related questions about the geographies of racial and ethnic groups in the US: How and why does immigrant settlement geography change? And how can we understand the dynamics of change in race and ethnic geographies in US cities? In the last decade he has published on these topics in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Progress in Human Geography, Economic Geography, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has two specific projects underway at the moment. The first examines how immigrant settlement geography within the US is responding to the current economic crisis. This is an NSF funded project which started in the summer of 2010 and is run with his long-term collaborator, Richard Wright of Dartmouth College. The second project, run with Steven Holloway of the University of Georgia and Richard Wright of Dartmouth College, examines the ways in which neighborhood geographies of race and ethnicity change in US cities, paying particular attention to the locations of mixed-race households within this residential fabric of race. Funding from NSF and the Russell Sage Foundation over the last ten years has allowed Ellis to access restricted-use census data to map the locations of mixed-race households, model the determinants of their residential location, and to assess their residential segregation. To locate mixed-race households in residential space Ellis and his team developed a neighborhood categorization scheme that defines neighborhoods by their level of diversity (low, medium and high) and group dominance (e.g. white, black, Asian, Latino, American Indian). The research group has implemented this scheme for 1990, 2000, and 2010 census data. The statistical mechanics of this categorization scheme and its visual implementation for the 50 largest metropolitan areas and, eventually, all states is accessible on the interactive website http://mixedmetro.com.

Dan Eisenberg’s research interests include evolution, anthropological genetics, human biology, telomere biology, aging, parental effects, and ADHD. His work is broadly focused on studying human variation in its ecological and cultural contexts to better understand health and disease from an evolutionary perspective.

Adrian Dobra’s research interests include computational social science, spatiotemporal modeling, Bayesian statistics, and modeling of complex dynamical phenomena using big data.

Brian Dillon is an economist specializing in the study of food and agricultural markets in developing countries, with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. His work ranges from microeconomic issues up to the level of international trade, covering topics such as household- and firm-level decision making, the operation of domestic markets for agricultural inputs and outputs, and links between domestic and international markets. He is also interested in the general topic of choice under uncertainty, with an emphasis on methodological and econometric issues related to the measurement of expectations.

Butch de Castro’s research focuses on how occupational-related factors influence the health of immigrant and minority worker populations. Specifically, his interest is in investigating how work and employment stressors experienced in the context of migration operate as social determinants of health and contribute to health disparities. The theoretical underpinnings for his research are the “healthy immigrant effect” and “immigrant paradox” hypotheses; the prevailing view being that immigrants (when they enter the US) are generally healthier than their US-born counterparts, though this health advantage declines with increased duration in the US. In the last five years he has published in this area in the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses Journal, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, and Public Health Nursing. He is Co-Investigator (with Dr. Gilbert Gee, UCLA School of Public Health) for a current NCI-funded R21 pilot longitudinal study that investigates obesity risk among immigrants. This transnational research project follows a cohort of immigrants from the Philippines to the US from a pre-migration baseline to up to 1 year post-migration, as well as a comparison non-migrant group. Stressors associated with the immigrant experience (i.e., racial/ethnic discrimination, neighborhood residence, employment transitions, and social support) are being studied in terms of their influence on changes in dietary practices, physical activity, and overall risk of obesity. He also recently received notice of funding from CDC-NIOSH for another R21 project that will assess agricultural-related occupational health and safety risks among Hmong farmers. The project will utilize novel methods including participatory rural appraisal and photovoice, in addition to conventional industrial hygiene observational exposure assessments. Another line of his research involves collaborating with labor unions, primarily those representing immigrant/minority workers such as those employed in the hotel, grocery, and food service industries. He currently has an R01 proposal submitted to NIMHD under review that will utilize a mixed-methods approach to examine differential exposures to occupational hazards based on nativity and minority status among this worker population.

Joe Cook  joined the School of Economic Sciences at Washington State University as an Associate Professor in August 2017 after ten years in the Evans School of Public Policy at the University of Washington.  His research focus has primarily been on water and sanitation policy in low-income countries, water resources economics and policy, and nonmarket valuation.  He has a new focus on green stormwater infrastructure and has an appointment with WSU Extension and the Washington Stormwater Center. He has conducted 12 household surveys in six countries, and is a Research Associate with the Kenya center of the SIDA-funded Environment for Development initiative. Consulting assignments have included work for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Asian Development Bank, the Hopi Tribe (Arizona), and the Washington State legislature. He received masters and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a bachelors degree from Cornell University.