We are excited to welcome you this week as we celebrate CSDE’s more than 75 years of demographic research and training at the UW! This Thursday and Friday May 15 and 16, we will share reflections and insights about:

• CSDE’S histories
• CSDE’s impact on research and training
• CSDE’s future contributions in the next 75 years

Join alumni, colleagues, faculty, friends, staff, and students for community building, learning, and refreshments. Learn more and register here!

Despite many new and ongoing efforts to end homelessness in the U.S., the goal remains stubbornly out of reach. In a recent article published in Housing Policy Debate, CSDE Affiliate Gregg Colburn (Real Estate) and co-authors outline two paths that could help policymakers end or dramatically reduce homelessness. The paper first describes the best evidence-based approaches that can be implemented and scaled within a status quo policymaking environment, and then outlines an alternative, expansionary state of policymaking that prioritizes greater investments aimed at addressing the structural housing drivers of homelessness. Read the full article here.

CSDE External Affiliate David Swanson (UC Riverside) was invited to present a talk titled “A new approach to probabilistic population forecasting with an application to Estonia” based on work with Jeff Tayman. This presentation will apply measures of uncertainty to existing population forecasts using Estonia as a case study. The measures of forecast uncertainty are relatively easy to calculate and meet several important criteria used by demographers who routinely generate population forecasts. This paper applies the uncertainty measures to a population forecast based on the Cohort-Component Method, which links the probabilistic world forecast uncertainty to demographic theory, an important consideration in developing accurate forecasts. Read the full abstract here.

Mental health care remains difficult to access in many American communities. In particular, immigrants and refugees may face more significant barriers to care because of racism, historical trauma, poverty, and other social inequities. CSDE Affiliates Lesley Steinman (Health Systems and Population Health) and Roberto Orellana (Social Work) were awarded a Tier 2 PHI grant with Neighborhood House and UW colleagues to evaluate whether and how the World Health Organization’s Problem Management Plus program works to improve mental health for social service providers, clients and families. Learn more here.

A growing body of evidence shows that eviction causes significant mental and physical health challenges for renters across the U.S. In a recent study published in Social Science and Medicine, CSDE Trainee Will von Geldern (Evans School) describes these challenges and examines whether and how legal assistance can reduce the harmful consequences of an eviction for low-income households. The study uses data from tenant interviews and quantitative case data to demonstrate the benefits and limitations of legal assistance from a population health perspective. Read the full study here.

More Than Citations: Leveraging Author Profiles & Altmetrics for Greater Engagement

Wednesday, May 14: 1:00-2:00pm on zoom

Understanding your research impact goes beyond traditional citations. In this workshop, we’ll explore how author profiles help showcase your publications and how altmetrics provide real-time insights into the broader reach of your work. Learn how to track online engagement, connect your research to global conversations, and enhance your visibility using tools like ORCID, Dimensions author profiles, and the Altmetric Bookmarklet. Whether you’re looking to strengthen your online presence or demonstrate impact for funding and career opportunities, this session will provide practical strategies to make your research stand out. Sign up here.

The College of Built Environments invites you to the second annual Community of Practice: Climate Solutions Symposium — an evening of conversation, connection, and celebration of the work CBE faculty and students are doing to advance climate solutions.

Enjoy a light reception and explore posters showcasing climate-related research, teaching and learning from across the college.

Ways to participate

• RSVP to attend the event
• Submit a poster: Share your work and engage with the community. Six posters will be selected for featured discussion, and two will receive $250 awards.

Key dates

• Poster submission deadline: Monday, April 28 at 11:59 p.m.
• Selected presenters notified: Friday, May 9

Let’s come together to share ideas and drive climate action!

The Formal Demography Working Group aims to bring together formal demography scholars and those interested in formal demography to discuss recent and classic work, brainstorm new ideas, and to foster new collaborations. The next meeting will be next Friday, 16 May at 11:30am ET (this is 4:30pm in UK). Hampton Gaddy from the London School of Economics will speak about ‘Challenges in Estimating Crisis Mortality: Spatial Heterogeneity, Endogenous Incompleteness, Sample Size, and Ad Hoc Methods.’

Abstract: Accurately estimating the mortality of crises can be methodologically difficult. Researchers often use ad hoc methods with biases that have not been systematically explored, or they apply ‘standard’ demographic methods that rely on assumptions that may be difficult to test in contexts of interest. In this talk, I first review the influence and bias of a class of ad hoc methods that estimate death tolls by extrapolating population counts before and after a crisis and subtracting the projected values (which I term the growth rate discontinuity method, or GRDM). Then, I will describe two interrelated problems that come from estimating excess mortality at different spatial scales. On one hand, when there are multiple mortality crises in a period of interest, spatially disaggregated data may be required for identifying the true baseline mortality for any one crisis; without sufficient disaggregation, death tolls will be underestimated. On the other hand, spatial aggregation is needed to meet the minimum population size required to estimate excess mortality precisely; without sufficient aggregation, death tolls will be underestimated or overestimated, depending on context. Finally, I will briefly discuss biases that arise when the completeness of mortality data in excess mortality models is not assessed.