Archives: Affiliates

Kathryn is a sociologist whose research examines how environmental hazards influence migration patterns, housing access, and the built environment, with a special focus on wildfires. As a Postdoctoral Research Associate, Kathryn is supporting the creation of a nationwide Dataset on Environment-Migration Systems and conducting analysis on hazard-mobility relationships in the United States.

I study stratification in education and in the labor market. Some of my current work looks at the potential of school choice policies to attenuate or exacerbate patterns of inequality and segregation in urban public education systems. I am also interested in students’ nontraditional pathways to and through postsecondary education, including a focus on older adults who return to school. Additional projects examine the implications of workplace institutions and practices — including unions and policies barring workers from discussing their earnings with their colleagues — for workers’ wages.

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario (in Canada). I earned my PhD in sociology from the University of Washington and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.

James Pfeiffer PhD, MPH, Professor in the Department of Global Health in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, Seattle, with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Pfeiffer is the director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Department of Global Health. He is also Executive Director of Health Alliance International (HAI), a non-profit based in Seattle affiliated with the Department of Global Health at UW, where he oversees health system strengthening projects in Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, and Timor Leste. Dr. Pfeiffer earned his PhD in Anthropology and his MPH at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has 30 years of research experience in implementation science, medical anthropology, and public health in Africa.

Dr. Chiyoung Lee obtained her BSN (2013) and MSN (2017) from Seoul National University. Upon graduation from the BSN program, she worked as a nurse in Emergency Department and Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Samsung Medical Center in South Korea (2013-2017). After a master’s degree, she served as a clinical lecturer and researcher at Seoul National University College of Nursing. She came to the United States to continue her study and earned a PhD in nursing (2020) from Duke University School of Nursing.

During her academic career, Dr. Lee has been interested in conducting health disparities research for vulnerable and minority populations. Highlights from her relevant skills, experience, and studies include: a diverse set of statistical tools and analytic techniques for exploring health disparities; methodological and theoretical foundation in disparities research, particularly among older adults; and national health surveys, lifespan developmental research, systematic review, and experimental design on reporting health disparities.

Celina Balderas Guzmán, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. Dr. Balderas’ research spans environmental planning, design, and science and focuses on climate adaptation to sea level rise on the coast and urban stormwater inland. On the coast, her work demonstrates specific ways that the climate adaptation actions of humans and adaptation of ecosystems are interdependent. Her work explores how these interdependencies can be maladaptive by shifting vulnerabilities to other humans or non-humans, or synergistic. Using ecological modeling, she has explored these interdependencies focusing on coastal wetlands as nature-based solutions. Her work informs cross-sectoral adaptation planning at a regional scale.

Inland, Dr. Balderas studies urban stormwater through a social-ecological lens. Using data science and case studies, her work investigates the relationship between stormwater pollution and the social, urban form, and land cover characteristics of watersheds. In past research, she developed new typologies of stormwater wetlands based on lab testing in collaboration with environmental engineers. The designs closely integrated hydraulic performance, ecological potential, and recreational opportunities into one form.

Her research has been funded by major institutions such as the National Science Foundation, National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, UC Berkeley, and the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab. She has a PhD in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she obtained masters degrees in urban planning and urban design, as well as an undergraduate degree in architecture all from MIT.

David Huh is a quantitative and clinical psychologist whose research focuses on advancing quantitative methodology in behavioral health intervention and health disparities research. His areas of research include alcohol use, chronic illness, suicide prevention, and culturally informed intervention with American Indian and Alaska Native communities and other underserved populations. An overarching goal of Dr. Huh’s research is making cutting-edge statistical methodology capable of more accurately evaluating health and social behavioral data more accessible to substantive researchers and non-statisticians.

Dr. Huh is presently the Director of the Methods Division at the University of Washington (UW) Indigenous Wellness Institute and a Licensed Psychologist in the State of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the UW in 2012 and completed his psychology residency at the UW School of Medicine and his postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors.

Dr. Huh’s recent research has focused on identifying the features of effective interventions for reducing problem alcohol use, particularly time-limited approaches appropriate for resource-limited settings. Towards that end, he is currently developing new statistical approaches for meta-analysis using individual participant data that can evaluate treatment effectiveness and pathways of change with greater accuracy than either traditional meta-analysis or single-study designs.

A key emphasis of Dr. Huh’s program of research is increasing the accessibility of statistical approaches that can more powerfully and accurately assess behavioral health interventions and test theoretical models of health and health disparities.

Dr. Rao is a Professor and Director at the Laboratory for Theory and Mathematical Modeling, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University. Until 2012, he held a permanent faculty position at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He had taught and/or performed research at several premier institutions including, the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), University of Oxford (Oxford, UK), the Indian Institute of Science (Bengaluru, India), Hiroshima University (Japan), and the University of Guelph, (Guelph, Canada) prior to his arrival at Augusta University.

Dr. Rao developed the first AI model in the world for the identification of COVID-19 through apps. His recent works on partition theorem in populations, Chicken-walk models, Rao’s Partition Theorem in Populations, and Rao-Carey Fundamental Theorem in stationary populations, Multilevel Contours, and Bundles of Complex Planes are well received. His recent EDLM (Exact Deep Learning Machines) are anticipated as a game changer in AI related experiments.

Ruoniu (Vince) Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. He studies spatial justice and inclusive communities, including their impacts reflected in the built environment, human behaviors, and policy interventions. Vince joined the University of Washington after serving six years as the research manager and director in a national non-profit organization Grounded Solutions Network. He has designed and conducted a U.S. Census of inclusionary housing policies, a U.S. census of community land trusts, and a national performance evaluation of shared equity homeownership programs. His research expands to policy evaluation for the two largest federal assisted housing rental programs in the U.S.: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program and the Housing Choice Voucher program. Vince grounds his research with applied tools to democratize data for low-income communities.