Pipeline Grants Competition

Organization: Russell Sage Foundation

Award amount: $50,000

Deadline: 10/1/2025

Description:

This initiative will support early-career scholars and promote diversity in the social sciences, including racial, ethnic, gender, disciplinary, institutional, and geographic diversity. Pipeline grantees are paired with mentors who offer advice on their projects and career development. The competition funds innovative research on economic mobility and access to opportunity in the United States. We are particularly interested in research focused on structural barriers to economic mobility and how individuals, communities and state entities understand, navigate and challenge systemic inequalities. Early-career faculty who have not previously received research grants (not counting a dissertation grant) or a visiting fellowship from RSF are eligible to apply.

Eligibility:

Early-career, Faculty & Pls

Only faculty who have not previously received a research grant or a visiting fellowship from RSF are eligible to apply. RSF expects to fund about 20 one-year projects by assistant professors, lecturers, and adjunct assistant professors. Individual applicants can apply for grants of up to $35,000; teams of two or more eligible applicants can apply for grants of up to $50,000. RSF will pair grantees with mentors conducting research on related issues and provide an honorarium for the mentors. On occasion, RSF will deem a project or applicant more appropriate for its Presidential Grants Competition and review a Pipeline Grants proposal as a letter of inquiry for that competition instead.

Link to RFP

When: Friday, October 3, 2025 (12:30 – 1:30PM)

Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here)

We are looking forward to hosting Dr. Tim Thomas, Chief Research and Data Officer at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) and professional researcher in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and Will von Geldern, PhD Candidate, Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington, on Friday, October 3, 2025 in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative.

This panel discussion will feature two researchers focused on housing, urban development, and displacement. Dr. Tim Thomas will present on “The Housing Precarity Risk Model: Predicting Displacement and Eviction Risk in a Post-COVID U.S.” Will von Geldern, will present on “Measuring Displacement: Using Mixed Methods to Understand Eviction Outcomes.”

Dr. Tim Thomas (he/they) is the Chief Research and Data Officer at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) and professional researcher in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. His work focuses on eviction, housing precarity, and urban inequality, blending advanced data science with liberation research to uncover systemic inequities and inform transformative housing policy.

He is the founder of the Eviction Research Network and formerly served as Research Director for UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project. His pioneering methods, including the use of eviction court record text-mining and displacement prediction modeling, have shaped tenant protections, extended the CDC eviction moratorium, and informed policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels including the White House, HUD, and Treasury.

Will von Geldern (he/him) is a PhD candidate at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. He uses mixed methods to examine the effects of public policies and legal systems on the health and wellbeing of marginalized communities. His dissertation combines qualitative analysis, data science, and experimental methods to study the barriers that prevent tenants from accessing legal assistance during evictions.

Please join CSDE on Friday (9/26) at 12:30pm (Location: Between Raitt Hall and Savery Hall) to celebrate the start of the 2025-2026 Academic Year! Catch up with your colleagues, meet new affiliates, staff members, fellows, and trainees, and find out what is new and upcoming at CSDE. You’ll have a chance to pick up your own, newly redesigned Autumn Qtr Seminar Series Poster and enjoy food and refreshments. We want to send a huge shout-out to our CSDE Seminar Series Chair, Rawan Arar, for her amazing work putting together the Fall 2025 Quarter Seminar Series! Thank you for all your work and creating an amazing seminar series for all of us! AND, thank you to Maddie Farris for tackling a re-design of the seminar series poster! It looks great Maddie!

We have a few updates to our leadership, Anjum Hajat will serve as CSDE’s interim Development Core PI, while Steven Goodreau is on sabbatical.  Anjum is faculty in the School of Public Health and studies social and environmental epidemiology. She brings a great deal of experience leading research grants and supporting early career researchers. CSDE is very lucky to rely on her outstanding expertise! Additionally, Zack Almquist’s outstanding research on homelessness is growing by leaps and bounds. Consequently, he has stepped aside as the Primary Research Area chair for Demographic Measures and Methods. Stepping into his place is Jon Wakefield.  Jon is faculty in Statistics and Biostatistics and leads the Space-Time and Bayes Research Group.

Our seminar series this autumn quarter includes speakers covering the full array of population research topics.  Leading off our speaker series on October 3 will be a panel presentation on Housing, Urban Development, and Displacement offered by CSDE Alum Tim Thomas (King Country Regional Homelessness Authority) and CSDE Trainee Will von Geldern (Evans School). On October 10, we’ll host another presentation about the region: A Portrait of the Unhoused Population of Seattle by Nathalie Williams, Hugo Aguas, Mingze Li, Yuanxi Li, Brandon Morande, Aryaa Rajouria, and Caroline Teague.

On October 17 we are especially honored to co-host with Sociology the Guest Lecture in honor of A. Pete Guest (former faculty member in Sociology and former editor of Demography).  Giving the Guest Lecture will be Dr. Susan Brown, CSDE and Sociology alumna and former advisee of Pete’s.  Susan’s talk is titled: From Human Ecology to Social Ties to Assimilation: The Legacy of Pete Guest.

Morgan Vickers (Law, Societies, and Justice) joins CSDE on October 24 to present on “Fit for Habitation only by the Negro”: Draining the Wretched Lowcountry Swamp, 1895-1915. On October 31, Sanyu Mojola (Princeton University) will present on her soon-to-be published book: Death by Design: Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol.

The last three lectures of the autumn quarter will be given by new assistant professors.  On November 7, Chia Liu (University of St Andrews) will speak on Growing up in the UK: Child Development in a Complex System. On November 14, José Alavez (Geography) will given a talk on Deep Mapping Grief and Loss in the Context of Migration. And, Hyungmin Cha (Sociology) will present on A Demographer’s View of Education and Dementia: Patterns, Predictability, and Persistence on November 21.

Last, but definitely not least, December 5 will be CSDE’s very enjoyable Lightning Talks and Poster Session.  For those of you who are new, this is a great time to learn more about the research of our students and to mingle and talk with each other!

For those of you who are new to CSDE, be sure to sign up for our calendar of events  and our weekly e-news.  The former includes our workshops and weekly seminar series and the latter includes a host of updates about CSDE affiliates’ accomplishments and opportunities for grants, conferences, publications, new research resources, etc.  Don’t forget to send your news to csde@uw.edu!