CSDE Affiliate Theresa Rocha Beardall (Sociology) has been named one of seven early career researchers in the newest class of William T. Grant Scholars. In 2025, the Puyallup Tribe signed a memorandum of understanding with thirteen public school districts to guide curriculum development on tribal culture and history, as part of Washington State’s mandated Since Time Immemorial curriculum. Alongside this MOU, the Puyallup Tribal Historic Preservation Department (THPD) is recovering Puyallup children’s boarding school records held by outside institutions for over a century to reclaim tribal authority over their educational narrative.

The UW Population Health Initiative recently awarded CSDE Affiliate Michelle Shin (Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing) a Tier 2 pilot research grant to partner with a community health center and community-based organizations to increase vaccine uptake among children in East African communities in Washington State. East African communities, including Somali, Eritrean, and Ethiopian communities, face disproportionately high risk due to low rates of measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (MMRV) vaccination driven by misinformation and systemic barriers.

CSDE Affiliate Isabelle Cohen (Public Policy) published “A Big-Push Community Intervention Reduced Rates of Child Marriage by 80%” in Nature. Cohen and co-authors used a paired cluster-randomized trial in 18 communities to evaluate a locally tailored intervention to reduce child marriage in northern Nigeria. The study shows that the intervention decreased rates of marriage among adolescent girls from 86% in the control group to only 21% in the treatment group,

CSDE Affiliate David Swanson (UC Riverside) has been recognized with the Alumni Distinguished Service Award by The Foundation for Western Washington University (WWU) & Alumni. These awardees were chosen from a community-wide nomination process and selected by the board. The Foundation for WWU & Alumni highlighted Swanson’s contributions as an internationally recognized demographer, prolific researcher, and higher education advocate. You can read more about Swanson’s accomplishments here. The Foundation also invites you to join the Alumni Awards ceremony on May 15.

Smithsonian Magazine quoted CSDE Affiliate Greg Bratman (Environmental and Forest Sciences) in a feature on how climate change, pollution, and extinction are altering the planet’s olfactory landscapes. Bratman noted that the invisible olfactory environments in which humans are embedded are often overlooked. The Smithsonian feature tapped into the theme of a 2025 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Working Group, co-organized by Bratman, Lucia Jacobs, and Asifa Majid.

Two years ago, CSDE was very pleased to help support the Simpson Center’s “Reproductive Racial Capitalism and Global Histories of Abortion” conference. That conference has now produced an edited collection through the American Historical Review (AHR) History Lab., titled “Traveling Histories of Abortion.” You can visit the AHR site to read more.

CSDE Affiliate Francisca Santana (Environmental and Forest Sciences) and co-authors highlighted the mental health risks facing wildfire researchers in a recent forum piece in Fire Ecology. Mental health risks include direct and secondary trauma compounded by climate anxiety and ecological grief. Drawing on their own experiences conducting interdisciplinary, community-engaged research in western North America, Santana and co-authors synthesize actionable recommendations for individual researchers, supervisors, and institutions to support researcher wellbeing.

Motivated by intersectionality theory and building on existing research, CSDE External Affiliate Callie Burt (Georgia State University) and Caitlin Dorsch used data from the National Crime Victimization Survey to examine heterogeneity in violent victimization rates among LGBT subgroups compared to non-LGBT counterparts. Rates of violent victimization are highest for bisexual individuals, followed by transgender, lesbian/gay, and non-LGBT individuals. Sociodemographic differences explain between 15% and 41% of disparities depending on subgroup, leaving the bulk unexplained.

In a recent article published in Frontiers in Public Health, CSDE Affiliate Kris Pui Kwan Ma (Family Medicine) and her colleagues examined how financial concerns affected psychological distress among Asian American adults, and whether benefit finding (a cognitive appraisal and behavioral adaptation process) and received pay (i.e., work for pay/profits or receive financial assistance) moderated this relationship. Using survey data from the 2021 Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander COVID-19 Needs Assessment Project,

CSDE Affiliate Hyungmin Cha (Sociology) recently published research on how childhood state education quality shapes the risk of cognitive impairment in mid-to-later life in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Behavior & Socioeconomics of Aging. Cha and co-authors linked data from the 2000–2020 Health and Retirement Study to historical records on state public education systems. Greater state-level educational resources, indicative of educational quality, were associated with a decreased risk of cognitive impairment, with or without dementia,