WEBINAR: Opportunities for Doing Social-Environmental Research with Little to No Funding (Virtual Event)

When: Monday, September 22nd (9:00AM – 12:00PM ET / 6:00AM – 9:00AM PT)

Graduate students, post-docs, and early-career faculty engaged in social-environmental research face an unprecedented research landscape. Decreased federal research funding will constrain their ability to continue their personal research programs, from dissertations to faculty research plans. Low-cost primary data collection, re-analysis of secondary data, creative use of available datasets, meta-analysis of existing studies, and localized field work can all be potential solutions.

The Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN), the Board on Environmental Change and Society (BECS), and the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will host a webinar that showcases practical, low-cost methods to sustain meaningful environmental and societal research during times of limited financial support. The webinar is aimed at supporting graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career faculty in environmental, social science, and associated disciplines.

Register Here

The State of Data Access II presented by mySidewalk

Thursday, September 25
2:00-3:00 pm ET / 1:00-2:00 pm CT)

Public data is foundational for good decisions—but that foundation is shifting.

From disappearing datasets to growing access gaps, communities are facing real challenges in finding timely, reliable information. But even in uncertainty, communities are finding ways to move forward.

Join public sector leaders and data experts for The State of Data Access II, a conversation about how we adapt, protect vital information, and build stronger systems for the future. In the conversation, we’ll explore:

• What’s driving today’s public data challenges.
• How communities are navigating uncertainty in collaborative, creative ways.
• Advice for strengthening resiliency in your own work and community.

Whether you’re working to improve access, responding to data gaps, or simply rely on public data to make informed decisions—this conversation is for you.

Register here

The Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 R&E Initiative NOFO is open!

 

On behalf of the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), we are reaching out with information you and your organization may be interested in regarding OVW’s Research and Evaluation (R&E) Initiative.

 

OVW’s R&E Initiative is designed to study approaches to addressing and preventing domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. By studying the efficacy of strategies for serving victims and holding offenders accountable, the R&E Initiative helps communities assess their current programs and adopt proven strategies. The initiative is designed to support researcher-practitioner partnerships and a broad range of research and evaluation methods, including qualitative, mixed-method, quasi-experimental, and experimental designs.

 

For FY 2025, OVW encourages R&E Initiative applicants to address one or more of the following topics, which are described in full in the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO): evaluations of VAWA-funded interventions; evaluations or systematic reviews of trainings, strategies, policies, practices, tools, and other means of fostering trauma-informed law enforcement and prosecutorial responses to sexual assault, domestic/dating violence, and stalking; evaluation of the effectiveness of training curricula, tools, and other technical assistance (TA) resources developed and implemented with OVW grant funds; evaluations of emerging innovations for serving victims and holding offenders accountable; secondary data analyses related to domestic/dating violence, sexual assault, and/or stalking; and research, evaluation, and data analysis related to domestic violence homicide prevention. This year’s R&E Initiative topic areas include a $5 million funding opportunity to evaluate Abby Honold Act-funded programs.

 

Important Dates and Information

• Letter of Intent: September 1, 2025, by 11:59 PM Eastern Time (ET) to OVW.Research@usdoj.gov.
• Application deadline for Grants.gov: September 23, 2025 – 11:59 p.m. ET
• Application deadline for JustGrants: September 25, 2025 – 8:59 p.m. ET

If you have questions, please reach out to the OVW Performance, Assessment, Research, and Evaluation (PARE) Unit at OVW.Research@usdoj.gov or R&E Program Analyst, Caitlyn Largent at Caitlyn.Largent@usdoj.gov. We also invite you to stay up to date with all OVW announcements by signing up for our emails here, and following us on social media: we’re on X/Twitter and LinkedIn.

Creating Moves to Opportunity: Mixed Methods Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice
A talk by: Stefanie DeLuca, Johns Hopkins University

Thursday, September 25, 2025

3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Eastern, via Zoom

Low-income families often live in neighborhoods with fewer opportunities to get ahead, even when they have housing vouchers that would allow them to move to neighborhoods with more potential for upward mobility. In this SSRC lecture, Johns Hopkins sociologist Stefanie DeLuca will explore why through two randomized interventions. In these experiments, housing voucher recipients were given varying levels of information, financial support, and customized search assistance to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. The treatment increased the share of those moving to high-upward-mobility areas from 15% to 53%. Qualitative interviews with participants in the program showed that the intervention increased families’ optimism about new neighborhoods and housing, eased demands on families’ time and attention and addressed their specific needs. The combination of the two experiments and the qualitative data reveal that the customized support and search assistance provided by the program navigator staff was the necessary driver of the experimental impacts, not financial assistance or information alone. These findings imply that many low-income families do not necessarily prefer to stay in low-opportunity areas and that barriers to housing searches significantly increase residential segregation by income.

Register Here

Speaker: Tyler Bruefach, PhD (Data Scientist, Knowli Data Science)

Moderator: Rachael Dominguez, MS (PhD Candidate, Florida State University)

 

Tyler Bruefach, PhD, is a Data Scientist at Knowli Data Science, where his central goal is to improve how we use data to better inform organizational and policy decisions. Using a diverse array of quantitative methodologies, he has worked with administrative data from three state agencies across three different states to support their decision-making processes. At Knowli, he engages in a variety of approaches tailored to clients’ needs, including developing descriptive and weighted algorithms from large-scale datasets, dynamic dashboard development, mixed-method program evaluations, inferential analyses using multivariable regression models, and development to quasi-experimental designs to evaluate the health and cost savings of public health interventions. He has collaborated with a diverse set of organizations, including government agencies on the local and state level, hospital systems, and local nonprofits.

 

Register for the session here:  https://american.zoom.us/meeting/register/SqL_ODrMQvWDHcJQ6j7sAw

Topics in Digital and Computational Demography

• • Date: 3-7 November 2025
  • Coordinator: Risto Conte Keivabu
  • Instructors: Boris Barron, Irena Chen, Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Risto Conte Keivabu, Jordan Klein, Ebru Sanlitürk, Benjamin-Samuel Schlueter, Tom Theile, Emilio Zagheni
  • Application deadline: 28 September 2025

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is offering a new edition of its open course on Topics in Digital and Computational Demography (3-7 November 2025) and encourages qualified candidates to apply.

 

This year, topics include:

• Introduction to Digital and Computational Demography; Approaches for combining representative data and non-probabilistic samples; Identifying sources of bias in digital trace data and adjusting for them. In the practice session, we will scrape websites with R and then access web-APIs from OpenAI with R.
• Digital trace data for migration research: Introduction to migration theories and ethics of digital data use; Fundaments of data collection and analysis of digital trace data; Advantages and critical challenges of using different types of digital trace data, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Trends, Wikipedia, and Bibliometric data.
• Introduction to geospatial and environmental data; Working with geospatial data in R; Advantages and pitfalls of available open data on the environment; Working with open geospatial and environmental data; Handling of environmental data for demographic research; Introducing a geospatial component to migration/mobility data.
• Simulations in the social sciences; Formulating assumptions into empirical tests; Loss functions for performance evaluation; Ordinary differential equations in modeling contexts; Empirical vs mechanistic models; Verifying and calibrating models.
• Bayesian approaches with applications to demography, Introduction to Bayes (comparison to frequentist statistics) including Bayes rule; implementation of MCMC algorithms (HMC, Gibbs), interpretation of results (credible intervals, posterior distributions) and model diagnostics; mortality models; methods for estimation issues in demography (missing data, small area estimation, multiple data sources).

The course will be offered in a hybrid format: in-person for students in the IMPRS-PHDS network who are already in Rostock; online (via Zoom) for everyone else.

How to apply

For more information and application instructions, please see the detailed course description.

To apply, please complete this form.

The deadline for applications is 28 September 2025. Applicants will be informed of their admission by 8 October 2025.

If you have any questions, reach out to phds@demogr.mpg.de

The Office of Research invites applications for the next round of the Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grant program. Proposals are due to RRF Monday, September 29, by 5:00 PM. Departments and Colleges/Schools may have earlier deadlines, so all applicants are advised to check with their program’s administrative staff. Awards will be announced by January 15, 2026.

The purpose of the RRF is to advance new directions in faculty research and contribute in substantive ways to the health, creativity, and productivity of the research ecosystem as defined by the University’s Vision Statement: “We discover timely solutions to the world’s most complex problems and enrich the lives of people throughout our community, the state of Washington, the nation, and the world.”

The RRF received a Public Records Request in June. The RRF team is responding to the request following UW guidelines. RRF Website.

 

Proposals must demonstrate a high probability of generating important new creative activities or scholarly understandings, new scholarly materials or resources, significant data or information, or essential instrumentation resources that are likely to significantly advance the reputation of the university, lead to external funding, or lead to the development of a new technology.

Submissions from all disciplines are welcome, with budgets up to $40,000, and will be peer reviewed through one of four RRF Review Committees:

• Arts and Humanities
• Social and Behavioral Sciences
• Basic Biological and Biomedical Sciences
• Physical Sciences and Engineering

Please submit your proposal to be reviewed in the research area that most closely matches your project, which might not necessarily match your home department. Project teams that review and follow all the instructions have a greater chance of funding.

• Faculty eligibility is now limited to Assistant and Associate Professors (including Research, Teaching, and WOT faculty). Full Professors are no longer eligible to submit new proposals.
• Co-Is (formerly Co-PIs) are considered equal in status to the PI and must have a measurable role in the project. Including more than one Co-I requires justification.
• We now ask for a Lay Summary – rather than an abstract – on the proposal cover page.
• Zoom office hours to support applicant teams will be available from 1 to 2 pm on September 10, September 17, and September 24.

Contact the RRF administrative staff with questions about the program: Peter Wilsnack, 206-685-9316.

 

The purpose of this Notice is to highlight interest in addressing the role of violence in health outcomes and integrating violence-related screening and interventions into health care settings. This Notice is to encourage intervention research focused on addressing exposure to violence – including but not limited to child maltreatment, intimate partner violence/teen dating violence, elder mistreatment, peer violence/bullying, and community violence – to improve individual-level health processes and outcomes. Read more here.