The Northwest Summit to Reimagine AI in Nursing & Healthcare (RAIN) will take place on Friday, May 15th from 9 AM – 3:30 PM. RAIN brings together leaders from healthcare, nursing, academia, industry, policy, and technology to reimagine how AI can responsibly strengthen care delivery and the health workforce. This is a highly interactive, forward-looking forum focused on real-world use cases, workforce readiness, and cross-sector partnerships, not hype. Attendees will leave with practical insights, new connections, and a clearer path for translating AI into meaningful impact.
CSDE’s training staff hosted virtual data visualization consultations in April to help students and affiliates strengthen the way they communicate quantitative research. Effective data visualization is essential for making research clear, accessible, and compelling, yet many researchers receive limited formal training in how to present tables and figures in slides, and posters for broader audiences.
CSDE Training Core PI Audrey Dorélien (Sociology), CSDE Affiliate Min Cha (Sociology), and CSDE Training Director Jessica Godwin provided nine consultations for students and affiliates preparing presentations for the Population Association of America 2026 conference, as well as one student preparing a poster for another upcoming conference. During the sessions, participants received targeted feedback on slides and posters, including how to ensure that figures conveyed the main message clearly, that tables were easy to interpret, and that their color choices supported accessibility and readability.
Please reach out and let us know if you would be interested in these services on a more regular basis or before certain key conferences.
CSDE is a member of the Association of Population Centers (APC). Each year the APC publishes a resource guide about all member centers. You might check it out and see what is happening elsewhere!
The 2026 Annual Meeting for the Population Association of America (PAA) is happening May 6th-May 9th, 2026. During that time we will have many CSDE affiliates, trainees, staff, former and upcoming seminar speakers, alumni, and friends presenting during the conference. If you would like to support CSDE, please see the links to view schedules of CSDE affiliated presentations by name or date!
Following tradition, CSDE is co-hosting a reception for affiliates, trainees, alumni, friends, and more! We will be joined by Population Center Studies and Training Center at Brown University, the Institute for Social Research Population Studies Center and the Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research at University of Michigan, the California Center for Population Research at UCLA, and the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Center for Demography of Health and Aging at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Please join us on Friday, May 8th from 6:00 – 8:30 PM at the Marriott St. Louis Grand, Landmark 4 Room. Refreshments and light appetizers will be served. Come enjoy some time with old friends and make some new friends too. Register here and see the event flyer here: PAA 2026 Reception Flyer.
Heat is one of the most frequently examined environmental influences on population health, and a wide variety of data sources exist to measure exposure. This pre-PAA workshop, sponsored by the Center on Aging, Health, and Environment (CACHE), provides an overview of heat measures and examples of two, including hands-on experience with code available via the CACHE website. Participants will generate temperature exposure measures from publicly available data, as well as wet bulb temperatures. The Universal Thermal Climate Index data will also be demonstrated and linked to population data. Learn more and register here. This workshop will take place in St. Louis, Missouri on May 6, 1-5:30 PM CT . Please note you must be registered for PAA in order to attend.
The workshop’s first exercise uses data from two different sources: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather-stations and ERA5-Land Reanalysis from the European Union’s Copernicus Project. Both are publicly available. The workshop will review information on acquiring and cleaning daily temperature data for New York City, as an example. Key is that air temperature as well as wet bulb temperature exposure variables are generated, and at varying temporal resolution. On the CACHE website, the code is embedded in an R Markdown pdf file.
The second exercise demonstrates how to construct severe heat measures using the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI, Copernicus ERA5-HEAT). It starts by showing data manipulation from raster (grid data) to a tabular dataset that obtains UTCI values for each municipality in Mexico as an example. Then, the data are mapped and analyzed as linked to population data. Finally, the number of days of severe heat (32°C UTCI and above) are generated. This code, also available on the CACHE website, is part of the demonstration CACHE project “Heat, Disability in older adults and Care” from El Colegio de Mexico.
Lead Instructors:
Dr. Frank Heiland, CUNY Institute for Demographic Research
Dr. Alex Mikulas, CACHE
Dr. Landy Sanchez, El Colegio de Mexico
Organizers:
Lori Hunter, University of Colorado Boulder, and Deborah Balk, CUNY Institute for Demographic Research
Keep an eye out for an email in the coming weeks with additional details.
In a new article in Quaternary Environments and Humans, CSDE Affiliate Jade d’Alpoim Guedes (Anthropology) investigates the spread of Sino-Tibetan languages to the eastern Tibetan Plateau, combining evidence from multiple scientific disciplines, applying data from linguistics, palaeoclimate and archaeology. The study focuses on the interaction among different groups of people, zooming into the contact and cultural dynamics of the eastern plateau between ca. 3300 BC to 846 AD. d’Alpoim Guedes observes diversification in both archaeological and linguistic evidence following the 4.2 kya event, suggesting a potential human response to the climate change. The results also illustrate acceptance and resistance of the populations on the Tibetan Plateau to different degrees in terms of agriculturalist economy and diversification of subsistence strategies in order to avoid risks.