*New* CSDE Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG): Lauren Woyczynski and Jessica Godwin (11/12/25)
Posted: 11/6/2025 (CSDE Workshop and Local Events)
When: November 12, 2025 from 10 – 11 am
Where: Raitt 223 and on Zoom
On November 12, CSDE’s Computational Demography Working Group will host CSDE Trainee Lauren Woyczynski (Sociology) and CSDE Staff Jessica Godwin (Statistical Demographer & Training Director).
The University of Washington Elections Database (UWED) project, led by CSDE Affiliate Scott Allard (Public Policy & Management) and CSDE External Affiliate Jake Grumbach (Berkeley), offers publicly available data on ballots, registered voters, and voting-age population at the precinct level in Washington from with differing temporal availability from 2007-2024. Funded by the state legislature, the UWED team standardizes these data across time and data type and adds enhancements using address geocoding and estimates of racial demographics using BISG. In this talk, CSDE Research Scientist Jessica Godwin and CSDE Trainee Lauren Woyczynski (Sociology) will discuss the data processing pipeline developed to address several pain points in the processing of UWED data, many of which are common to large-scale and heterogenous administrative data.
Lauren Woyczynski is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at the University of Washington. She also holds a Masters’ in Public Health from UW focused on Health Metrics and Evaluation. She has worked as a Data Scientist on the UW Elections Database since 2023. Her research interests span social demography, structural determinants of health, and computational methods. Her current research focuses on health disparities related to mass incarceration in the United States.
Jessica Godwin is a Statistical Demographer and the Training Director for the Demographic Methods Certificate Program with CSDE. In her role as a Statistical Demographer, she will support the research of CSDE Affiliates and Trainees via consulting and the organization and facilitation of CSDE Workshops. Dr. Godwin received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington in 2021 and also completed CSDE’s Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods. She was also the recipient of two CSDE fellowships, one from NICHD and one from the Shanahan Endowment. Her dissertation work examined how to best estimate child mortality from various sources and to improve upon national and subnational estimates in places with sparse data. As part of that effort, she led a study with CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield published in Statistics in Medicine that developed space-time modeling techniques for subnational child mortality estimates in low and middle-income countries. Subnational estimations of child mortality for 22 countries developed in collaboration with UN IGME can be found at https://childmortality.org/. Her broad research interests are demography, Bayesian spatiotemporal methods, survey statistics, and the places where all of those things overlap. She was born and raised in Alabama and received her M.S. in Statistics at Auburn University. Her thesis, titled “Group lasso for functional logistic regression”, was advised by Nedret Billor. She also received a B.S. in Actuarial Science. To read more about Dr. Godwin, visit her website: https://jlgodwin.github.io/.
Date: 11/12/2025