The Office of the Provost’s Research Resilience series will host a panel discussion, “Disappearing Data Panel & Discussion: Recoveries, Repositories, and Resiliencies,” on Monday, May 19^th from 9:30am to 11am that will be facilitated by CSDE Director Sara Curran. This panel presentation will provide an overview of the challenges surrounding the loss of data, including data that is removed from publicly available sites, national surveys that are canceled, and standard survey measures or data changed for non-scientific reasons. The panelists will discuss the current status of these challenges, approaches for recovering and restoring data, and possible strategies for resilience. Click here to learn more and register.

When: Friday, May 9, 2025 (12:30-1:30PM)

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

1-on-1 meetings: 223 Raitt Hall on Thursday, May 8 (sign up here)

We are looking forward to hosting Ann Chih Lin from The University of Michigan on Friday, May 9 in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative, the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, and the Center for Global Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies.

In the forty years since the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), no significant reform to the structure of immigration law has made it through the U.S. Congress.  Yet during those forty years, how immigrants enter the United States, where they come from, where they settle, who employs them, and how they adapt to American life have all changed dramatically.  During the same time, a shadow state of immigration regulation has developed, based not on statutory law but on precedents, executive action, federal agency guidance, and state and local policy entrepreneurship.  None of these provides a stable legal structure for immigrants, their families, their employers, or their neighborhoods and communities.  Instead, in Let States Select Immigrants,  the case is made that rather than ceding regulation to the federal government or individual employers that states should govern immigration selection, basing their decisions on economic development strategies, interest in population growth, and family and community resources.

Potential immigrants would apply for state-specific work or entrepreneurship permits, which could be further restricted as to economic sector and geographical area.  States would also take community applications for refugee resettlement, based on plans submitted by sponsoring families, groups of interested citizens, and agencies.  In support of this state-based framework, the federal government would enforce identity-based verification for entry and exit from the United States and for state work permits.  Citizenship, based on birthright or naturalization, would continue to be determined by the U.S. Constitution and appropriate national law.

Why states?  The role of immigration in the economic development of both geographical areas and industries is generally understood.  But ideological polarization around the issue of illegal immigration, and the control of legal immigration by private actors (employers and families), have prevented the use of immigration as an economic development tool.  States and localities that might wish to use immigration as a workforce and/or community development strategy have been largely unable to make the argument in the political and policy categories that are available to them.  And yet states and localities not only have the most knowledge of their economic development needs, but are best equipped to develop political compromises between those who champion and those who fear immigration.

Ann Chih Lin is an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.  She was part of the Detroit Arab American Studies Team that produced the landmark Citizenship in Crisis:  Arab Detroit after 9/11 (Russell Sage 2009).  She has also conducted research on national security investigations of Chinese American scholars, and written and edited books on prison rehabilitation, on poverty, and on racial disparities.  In 2021, she was named Lieberthal-Rogel Professor of Chinese Studies and currently serves as Director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.

CSDE Research Scientist June Yang, PhD, along with Ihsan Kahveci, PhD candidate in Sociology and CSDE trainee, and CSDE Affiliate Zack W. Almquist, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology and Statistics (PI), have been leading a project to develop open-source software facilitating the data collection about the unhoused population in King County, WA. 

This project aims to develop scientific software to support the implementation of a network-based data collection and estimation method (building on Respondent-Driven Sampling) for enumerating unsheltered people in King County. The software is centered around a web-based app, providing a one-stop solution for recording network information and survey responses from respondents. The software also features a HIPAA-compliant design to facilitate additional data linkages with existing systems such as Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). The project is funded through a UW Population Health Initiative Tier III grant. 

Dr. Yang has been providing direct support for project development, which includes, but is not limited to, usability research, scoping, team recruitment, software design, and development. As part of a broader project team working on data collection and analysis of homelessness experiences, Dr. Yang has been supporting the data processing and analytical work on the survey data collected in 2023 and is expected to support the next step in grant applications arising from this effort.

To arrange a consultation appointment with June Yang or any of CSDE’s scientific support staff, please use the CSDE Science Core Consultation Request form.

Join us on May 8th from 2:00 – 3:30pm for a workshop that will provide an introduction to biospecimen data collection with CSDE Biodemography Lab Director Tiffany Pan. We will cover ethical considerations, a broad range of specimen types, equipment and supplies needed for transport and storage, analyte stability, and other practical factors for designing a study that involves specimen collection and storage for downstream biomarker analyses. No prior experience with biomarker research is necessary.

The workshop will be fully remote. A Zoom link for online attendance will be provided upon registration. Register here.

CSDE Affiliates Griselda Martinez (lead author) and Katarina Guttmannova (senior author) both in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and colleagues analyzed patterns of cannabis use, related risk factors such as norms about and perceived harm from use, and their associations over the course of young adulthood in a legalized nonmedical cannabis context using 2015-2022 data from young adults in Washington State. The results, published in this Prevention Science article, suggest preventive intervention efforts should include sustained focus on cannabis-specific risk factors across young adulthood. Read the full article here.

Most studies of the aftermath of war have examined the perspectives of refugees, veterans in the U.S., or survivors in Europe. In a recent news article published by Science, CSDE External Affiliate Kim Korinek (University of Utah) describes how her team’s Vietnam Health and Aging Study has created a new source of data to measure early life trauma exposure and health in later life among people in Vietnam. CSDE Biodemography Lab Director and Research Scientist Tiffany Pan and CSDE Affiliate Melanie Martin supported the biomarker data collection for this project. In the article, Korinek explains that these data will help more comprehensively document the lasting consequences of violence and conflict. Read the full article here.