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.
Mariana Amorim is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington State University. She has a MPP from Oregon State University and a PhD in Policy Analysis and Management with a minor in Demography from Cornell University. Her research and teaching specializations include family demography, poverty, inequality, social policies, applied demography, statistics, and research methods. Amorim’s work sheds light on the role of public, private, and “shadow” safety nets in promoting the well-being of parents and children during an era of increasing family complexity and economic inequality. Her manuscripts have been published in selective outlets such as Demography, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Problems, Sociological Science, and Social Science Research. Her research has received support from the William T. Grant Foundation, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as seed funds from the NYU Cash Transfer Lab, Washington State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ole Hexel’s research examines the causes and consequences of economic inequality in Europe and the United States. He explores when and how parents support their children financially, using survey data. He also works on population-level descriptions of kin structure and wealth inequality, using register data. He uses techniques from survey analysis, network analysis and simulation.
His research has been published in PNAS. He is currently a post-doc at the Laboratory for Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. He has obtained a PhD and an MA in Sociology from Northwestern University and from the Institut d’études politiques de Paris.
Heather is a socio-legal scholar who focuses on the ways in which institutions such as the law, higher education, and the medical field interact with marginalized populations. She has conducted statistical analyses, ethnographic fieldwork, and evaluation research. Heather’s current work is in the field of Critical Disability Studies examining disclosure, identity management, and workplace accommodations among people with physical, mental, and sensory differences that are not readily apparent. She is also committed to community based research and does consulting work for local social justice organizations, primarily focusing on disparities within the criminal justice system. Heather earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Washington and spent 8 years teaching courses in the Department of Sociology; Disability Studies Program; and the Law, Societies & Justice Department at UW. She joined the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at UW in July 2021 as an Acting Assistant Professor and Research Director for the Northwest ADA Center.
Jack DeWaard earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was an NICHD Trainee in the Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE). He then spent about one decade as an Assistant Professor and tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, where he was a faculty affiliate in the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Institute on the Environment, the Minnesota Population Center, and the Life Course Center. Most recently, Jack served as Scientific Director in the Division of Social and Behavioral Science Research at the Population Council, where he remains a research collaborator.
As a geographer, I have always been interested in exploring the connections between human societies and the environment. I received broad trainings in both the biophysical sciences and the social sciences and integrated quantitative, qualitative, and GIS methods into my research. My thesis analyzed the spatio-temporal changes of urban landscape patterns in response to urbanization, with a focus on green space conservation and landscape ecology. In my doctoral research, I explored different perspectives on ecological restoration from the standpoints of scientists, professional practitioners, and volunteers. Based on case studies from Wisconsin and Michigan, I cross-examined the meanings of science, nature, and public participation embedded in restoration ideologies and practices.
Currently as a lecturer in the Program on the Environment at the University of Washington, my primary role is undergraduate education, through which I experiment with innovative teaching strategies. My current research projects include comparing student learning outcomes between in-person and online formats of the same course, methods for cross-cultural learning experience through virtual collaboration, and case study pedagogy. I am an active member of the UW Center for Teaching and Learning. Externally, I am involved in the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center’s program on “Teaching Socio-Environmental Synthesis with Case Studies.” I frequently present my work at conferences by associations such as the American Association of Geographers, Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences, and North American Association for Environmental Education.
At the UW, I am also a core faculty member of the Taiwan Studies Program. I lead a summer study abroad program to Taiwan with the theme on exploring environmental and social resilience. In the course “Environmental Issues in East Asia”, we survey contemporary environmental issues in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan through a comparative lens. Every Winter Quarter, I organized a lecture series focusing on Contemporary Environmental Issues in East Asia. In addition to teaching and research, I advise students on Capstone projects, including topics about environmental education, greenway infrastructure, sustainability design, community outreach, clean-up site prioritization and many others.