The CSDE Development Core is happy to announce a Population Research Planning Grant awarded to CSDE Affiliate Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen, Professor in the School of Social Work and a long-time expert on healthy aging among LGBTQ+ adults.

In 2020, Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen worked to establish an international collaboration of researchers in 18 countries across six world regions—from Canada to Japan to Argentina to Nigeria to Pakistan. Collectively, the group piloted online and mail-in surveys about health and life experiences among adult members of sexual and gender minorities in each country.

CSDE’s Executive Committee is pleased to introduce three of our new UW Faculty Affiliates:

Rachel Prusynski – Assistant Professor, Physical Therapy. Her research agenda is to inform equitable policy and facilitate quality evidence-based rehabilitative care to reduce disability, especially for socioeconomically vulnerable patients. She is a health services researcher focusing on relationships between rehabilitation processes and outcomes in post-acute care, with an emphasis on the impact of health policy on therapy practice and patient outcomes.

CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield, along with co-authors, has published new research in arXiv entitled, “Small Area Estimation with Random Forests and the LASSO”. They consider random forests and LASSO methods for model-based small area estimation when the number of areas with sampled data is a small fraction of the total areas for which estimates are required. Abundant auxiliary information is available for the sampled areas, from the survey,

CSDE Alum Colin Baynes and CSDE Affiliate Kenneth Sherr, along with co-authors, has recently published new research in JMIR Publications entitled, “Enhancing the Introduction and Scale Up of Self-Administered Injectable Contraception (DMPA-SC) in Health Systems (the EASIER Project): Protocol for Embedded Implementation Research”. The introduction of self-administered injectable contraception presents an opportunity to address the unmet need for family planning. As ministries of health scale up self-administered injectable contraception,

CSDE Affiliate Ann Bostrom, along with co-authors, has published new research in the latest edition of the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction entitled, “Where does scientific uncertainty come from, and from whom? Mapping perspectives of natural hazards science advice”. The science associated with assessing natural hazard phenomena and the risks they pose contains many layers of complex and interacting elements, resulting in diverse sources of uncertainty.

CSDE Affiliate Ali Mokdad was recently quoted in a CNN article entitled, “It seems like everyone has Covid-19. Here’s why this wave is probably worse than official data suggests”. Dr. Mokdad’s expertise in population health has helped UW produce regular estimates of Covid-19 case rates and projections for trends from 2020 to 2022, but the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation paused that modeling in December. All of the measures that factored into the model had stopped being reported or had changed in some way.

CSDE External Affiliate Claus Pörtner, along with co-authors, has published new research on the “Impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown on healthcare inaccessibility and unaffordability in Uganda” in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Several studies have reported adverse consequences of the COVID-19 lockdowns on the utilization of healthcare services across Africa. However, little is known about the channels through which lockdowns impacted healthcare utilization. This study focuses on unaffordability as a reason for not utilizing healthcare services.

A new article published by CSDE Affiliate Karin Frey, and co-authors, in the School Psychology Review discusses how the gratitude youth feel after different types of bystander action may depend on which behaviors are most congruent with personal beliefs. In this study, 264 ethnically diverse adolescents (African, European, Mexican-American, and Indigenous) from the Pacific Northwest described past instances when they experienced an act of peer-instigated aggression and subsequent bystander action.

CSDE Affiliate Michael Spencer was recently quoted in a news article by The Seattle Times entitled, “After devastating Maui fires, let’s center people, not tourism“. Dr. Spencer is a Native Hawaiian (Kānaka ‘Ōiwi) researcher and Professor in the School of Social Work and Director of Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Oceania Affairs here at UW. This article highlights Dr. Spencer’s findings that focus on health equity among Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) populations.

CSDE External Affiliate Arni Rao recently led research on an article entitled, “Stationary status of discrete and continuous age-structured population models” published in Mathematical Biosciences. This article argues how the partition theorem-based approach provides more up-to-date and timely measures to find the status of the population stationarity of a country better than the NRR-(net reproductive rate) based approach. He questions the timeliness of the value of NRR in deciding the stationary process of the country and proves associated theorems on discrete and continuous age distributions and derive measurable functional properties.