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CSDE Welcomes 5 New External Affiliates

Posted: 10/31/2024 ()

CSDE is pleased to welcome back some of our former T32 trainees and fellows as External Research Affiliates! Holly Hummer’s (Sociology, Harvard University) research is broadly focused on the mechanisms shaping individuals’ family and employment pathways and on how these pathways play into broader demographic and social patterns. Hilary Schwandt’s (Professor, Western Washington University) main area of research interest is reproductive health, her dissertation was on unsafe abortion in Ghana and included a qualitative study on the pathways to abortion, a comparison of incomplete pregnancy patients and a randomize, noninferiority trial of group vs individual family planning counseling. Elizabeth Hirsh’s (Professor, University of British Columbia) work focuses on employment discrimination and the policies and practices that minimize bias. Elizabeth Korver-Glenn (Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) speaks about many things related to racism, White supremacy, markets, or urban/neighborhood inequality. Ahmed Abdeen Hamed’s (Assistant Teaching Professor, Northeastern University & Head of Clinical Data Science/Network Medicine & AI at the Sano Centre for Computational Medicine and Personalized Health) primary research objectives revolve around addressing intricate challenges in clinical data science and network medicine, deploying computational solutions to advance the understanding of complex diseases, such as cancer, from clinical, genetic, and pharmaceutical standpoints. Learn more about each affiliate in the full story!

  • Holly Hummer – Holly Hummer is a Sociologist with interests in family, gender, and work. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in 2024 and will be a visiting scholar at the University of Washington for the 2024-2025 academic year.Her research is broadly focused on the mechanisms shaping individuals’ family and employment pathways and on how these pathways play into broader demographic and social patterns. Much of this work sits at the intersection of family sociology, feminist and gender scholarship, cultural sociology, and population studies. She has a deep interest in advancing and advocating for the use of qualitative and cross-national, comparative methods to understand social life.
  • Hilary Schwandt – Hilary Schwandt earned her BS in Biochemistry from California Polytechnic State University. After graduating from Calpoly she lived in Jamaica for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer. She then earned her master’s and her doctoral degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Hilary’s doctoral dissertation was on unsafe abortion in Ghana and included a qualitative study on the pathways to abortion, a comparison of incomplete pregnancy patients and a randomized, noninferiority trial of group vs. individual family planning counseling. Her main area of research interest is reproductive health. Just prior to joining Fairhaven College, Hilary was working in the research division at the Center for Communication Programs in Baltimore, Maryland. At the Center for Communication Programs she was the technical monitoring and evaluation advisor for numerous projects, such as the Go Girls Initiative! – a project that aimed to reduce adolescent girls’ vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in Botswana, Malawi, and Mozambique; the Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative – a project that aimed to reduce the barriers to family planning use among the urban poor; a prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission project in Ethiopia; and a malaria prevention during pregnancy project in Zambia. Hilary grew up in Bellingham and she is delighted for the opportunity to live once again in Bellingham and work with the esteemed Fairhaven College faculty.
  • Elizabeth Hirsh – Elizabeth Hirsh is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, where she studies work and employment, organizational dynamics, gender and race inequality, and the law. Much of her work focuses on employment discrimination and the policies and practices that minimize bias. Hirsh regularly presents her research to professional and policy audiences and consults with governmental agencies in both Canada and the U.S. At UBC, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on work, inequality, and quantitative data analysis. While not at work, Hirsh spends her time running, enjoying the beautiful outdoors, keeping up with her three children, and coaching youth sports.
  • Elizabeth Korver-Glenn – Eizabeth Korver-Glenn is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She studies, writes, teaches, and speaks about many things, most of them in some way related to racism, White supremacy, markets, or urban/neighborhood inequality. Propelling it all is this aim: to do justice.
  • Ahmed Abdeen Hamed – Over the past decade, Ahmed Abdeen Hamed has dedicated himself to academic training, cultivating a robust foundation that seamlessly integrates into both his academic and industrial pursuits in Data Science. His primary research objectives revolve around addressing intricate challenges in clinical data science and network medicine, deploying computational solutions to advance the understanding of complex diseases, such as cancer, from clinical, genetic, and pharmaceutical standpoints. Within the academic realm, his ambition extends beyond personal growth. He is committed to democratizing knowledge in problem-solving, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, not only for the local student community but also for scientists and professionals within my field. His journey has been marked by leadership in diverse research projects, particularly in the field of Biomedical literature mining. Notably, a project closely aligned with the proposed venture involved mining the Biomedical literature to uncover drug-disease links and algorithmically ranking their chemical molecules based on specificity. During his tenure as an R&D scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, he designed and implemented an algorithm, leading to academic publications and eventual patenting under US Patent 10,978,178 in 2021. This groundbreaking work laid the foundation for his subsequent endeavors in Drug Repurposing. The relevance of this research became glaringly evident with the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic.