Ole Hexel’s research examines the causes and consequences of economic inequality in Europe and the United States. He explores when and how parents support their children financially, using survey data. He also works on population-level descriptions of kin structure and wealth inequality, using register data. He uses techniques from survey analysis, network analysis and simulation.His research has been published in PNAS. He is currently a post-doc at the Laboratory for Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. He has obtained a PhD and an MA in Sociology from Northwestern University and from the Institut d’études politiques de Paris.
Archives: Affiliates
Evans, Heather
Heather is a socio-legal scholar who focuses on the ways in which institutions such as the law, higher education, and the medical field interact with marginalized populations. She has conducted statistical analyses, ethnographic fieldwork, and evaluation research. Heather’s current work is in the field of Critical Disability Studies examining disclosure, identity management, and workplace accommodations among people with physical, mental, and sensory differences that are not readily apparent. She is also committed to community based research and does consulting work for local social justice organizations, primarily focusing on disparities within the criminal justice system. Heather earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Washington and spent 8 years teaching courses in the Department of Sociology; Disability Studies Program; and the Law, Societies & Justice Department at UW. She joined the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at UW in July 2021 as an Acting Assistant Professor and Research Director for the Northwest ADA Center.
DeWaard, Jack
Jack Dewaard is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Society and Social Justice at Saint Martin’s University. Jack earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was an NICHD Trainee in the Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE).
Weng, Yen-Chu
As a geographer, I have always been interested in exploring the connections between human societies and the environment. I received broad trainings in both the biophysical sciences and the social sciences and integrated quantitative, qualitative, and GIS methods into my research. My thesis analyzed the spatio-temporal changes of urban landscape patterns in response to urbanization, with a focus on green space conservation and landscape ecology. In my doctoral research, I explored different perspectives on ecological restoration from the standpoints of scientists, professional practitioners, and volunteers. Based on case studies from Wisconsin and Michigan, I cross-examined the meanings of science, nature, and public participation embedded in restoration ideologies and practices.
Currently as a lecturer in the Program on the Environment at the University of Washington, my primary role is undergraduate education, through which I experiment with innovative teaching strategies. My current research projects include comparing student learning outcomes between in-person and online formats of the same course, methods for cross-cultural learning experience through virtual collaboration, and case study pedagogy. I am an active member of the UW Center for Teaching and Learning. Externally, I am involved in the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center’s program on “Teaching Socio-Environmental Synthesis with Case Studies.” I frequently present my work at conferences by associations such as the American Association of Geographers, Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences, and North American Association for Environmental Education.
At the UW, I am also a core faculty member of the Taiwan Studies Program. I lead a summer study abroad program to Taiwan with the theme on exploring environmental and social resilience. In the course “Environmental Issues in East Asia”, we survey contemporary environmental issues in China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan through a comparative lens. Every Winter Quarter, I organized a lecture series focusing on Contemporary Environmental Issues in East Asia. In addition to teaching and research, I advise students on Capstone projects, including topics about environmental education, greenway infrastructure, sustainability design, community outreach, clean-up site prioritization and many others.
Somashekhar, Mahesh
Mahesh Somashekhar’s core research agenda concerns how urban economic development and social inequality affect one another. More specifically, he studies the effects of commercial development on urban and suburban communities, with a particular focus on immigrant entrepreneurship, gentrification, and gayborhoods.
Somashekhar is currently pursuing two projects. The first investigates the entrepreneurship patterns of undocumented immigrants in the United States. While it is illegal to employ undocumented immigrants, it is legal for undocumented immigrants to own businesses in the formal economy. Nevertheless, little is known about how firms owned by undocumented immigrants influence economic development and socioeconomic mobility trends.
His second project aims to understand the effect of gentrification on local retailers and community organizations. To that end, Somashekhar is digitizing and geocoding the corpus of the Gayellow Pages, a U.S. directory of local organizations serving LGBTQ+ people that has been in continuous publication since the 1970s. He is using these data to understand whether LGBTQ+ organizations are surviving the gentrification of gay villages, and where they are moving when they are displaced.
Somashekhar’s research has been published in journals including Social Problems, City & Community, Urban Affairs Review, and Economic Development Quarterly. Prior to joining UIC, Somashekhar was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington. He earned a PhD and an MA from Princeton University as well as a BS from Columbia University. More about his background and research can be found on his website.
Spiker, Marie
What would it look like for us to equitably nourish a growing global population? More importantly, how do we get there – which inputs have more leverage within complex systems, and what evidence do decision-makers need in order to support public health? Dr. Marie Spiker approaches public health nutrition research through a food systems lens that recognizes the need for transdisciplinary and multisectoral collaboration.
Dr. Spiker’s research interests include public health nutrition, sustainable food systems, food loss and waste, value chains for nutrition, systems modeling of food supply chains, and capacity building within nutrition and public health. To explore these topics, she draws from training in quantitative and qualitative methods and systems science, as well as her training as a registered dietitian nutritionist. Her professional practice experience includes work with municipal food policy and capacity building within the profession of nutrition and dietetics.
Hiramori, Daiki
Daiki Hiramori is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Global and Interdisciplinary Studies at Hosei University in Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include quantitative sociology, queer and feminist studies, sexuality and gender stratification, and the demography of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). He graduated from the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and a minor in Mathematics in 2014. He also earned an MA in Sociology in 2016, a Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies in 2018, and a PhD in Sociology in 2022, all from the University of Washington.
He uses quantitative methods to study stratification and inequality based on sexuality and gender as well as sexual and gender minority populations from a queer and feminist perspective. In particular, he is interested in socioeconomic inequality based on SOGI, the measurement of SOGI on surveys, and queer and feminist methodologies. In his dissertation “Sexuality Stratification in Contemporary Japan: A Study in Sociology,” he used the Osaka City Residents’ Survey, one of the few population-based surveys that ask about sexual orientation in Japan, to explore the association between sexual orientation and educational attainment, occupational segregation, and earnings disparities in Japan. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Population Problems and Gender and Sexuality. Through his research and educational activities, he is committed to using his privilege as a social scientist to focus on the ways in which systemically marginalized populations, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, become free in a system that operates to oppress them. Please see Daiki’s personal website (https://hiramori.com/
Seigel, Stephan
Stephan Siegel is the Michael G. Foster Endowed Professor of Finance and Business Economics at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business in Seattle, which he joined in 2005. A native of Hamburg, Germany, he earned a B.S. from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and a Ph.D. in Finance from Columbia University in the City of New York. Prior to his graduate studies, Stephan worked in Europe and China as a project manager with GCI Management, Munich, an international private equity and management consulting firm.
Stephan’s research interests are in international finance as well as household finance. Together with his co-authors, he has examined the globalization of financial markets, the integration of European capital markets, and most recently the pricing of political risk. Stephan’s research in household finance has pioneered the use of genetically informed data to explore biological predispositions with respect to risk taking and investment biases. Most recently, he has explored the role of the cultural transmission of preferences about risk and uncertainty.
His research has been published in a large number of academic journals as well as covered by leading news organizations, including, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times.
Enquobahrie, Daniel
Daniel Enquobahrie is a Professor in UW’s department of Epidemiology, and an Adjunct Professor in Health Systems and Population Health. Dr. Enquobahrie’s research interests span cardiovascular/metabolic, reproductive/perinatal, and genetic/epigenetic epidemiology. His research focuses on (1) pre-pregnancy and early/mid pregnancy risk factors (and associated mechanisms) for pregnancy complications and outcomes, and (2) early life and developmental origins of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases.
Von Draanen, Jenna
Jenna Von Draanen is an Assistant Professor in the department of Child, Family & Population Health Nursing. The aim of Jenna’s research is to improve science and address health disparities through the rigorous evaluation of interventions and their methods of implementation. Her research agenda advances scientific understanding of the social forces influencing mental health and substance use disorders, which is done through a focus on the harms of socioeconomic marginalization and childhood adversity and in a way that includes the perspectives of people with lived experience. Jenna approaches her research with a life course perspective that ensures phenomena like childhood adversity are properly contextualized and situated with an understanding of the way adversities build over time and across generations, through the concept of linked lives. While her primary appointment is in the School of Nursing, she is an interdisciplinary researcher at heart, coming to the UW from a postdoctoral fellowship in Sociology at the University of British Columbia (in Vancouver, Canada), and holding a PhD in Community Health Sciences from UCLA.