CSDE is pleased to introduce four of our new UW Research Affiliates. Joan Casey (Assistant Professor, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences) studies climate-related environmental challenges while considering the important role of social determinants of health, with the goal of informing policy decisions. Emily Godfrey (Professor, Family Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology) is a clinician-researcher and has a robust research portfolio around women’s health issues. Sasha Johfre’s (Assistant Professor, Sociology) research considers creation and consequences of conceptual categories, including ways that human difference (e.g., based on gender, race, age, etc.) is seen as real and natural. Erin McElroy’s (Assistant Professor, Geography) research focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, digitality, empire, and racial capitalism in the U.S. and in Romania, alongside housing justice organizing, countermapping, and transnational solidarities. Learn more about each affiliate in the full story! 

Joan Casey – Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Washington. Joan Casey is an environmental epidemiologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health. She received her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) in 2014, advised by Dr. Brian S. Schwartz. She holds a BS in Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University and an MA in Applied Physiology from Columbia University. She completed a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Postdoctoral Fellowship, where she had the opportunity to initiate ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations. She studies climate-related environmental challenges while considering the important role of social determinants of health, with the goal of informing policy decisions.

 

Emily Godfrey – Professor, Department of Family Medicine, University of Washington. Emily Godfrey is a University of Washington Professor of Family Medicine, with a joint appointment in UW Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology on the clinician-researcher track. She is a board-certified practicing family physician with fellowship training in family planning and reproductive health. With funding from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Society of Family Planning, industry and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), she has combined her background in primary care, public health and experience in clinical trials, observational studies, quality improvement, and patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) to build a robust research portfolio around women’s health issues. Since joining UW in 2012, she has secured funding as the principal investigator (PI) or Co-PI of a total of 18 grants and has 60 peer-reviewed publications in my focused area of investigation.

Sasha Johfre – Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Washington. Sasha Johfre is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and core faculty in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences at the University of Washington. Her research considers the creation and consequences of conceptual categories, including ways that human difference (e.g. based on gender, race, age, etc.) is seen as real and natural. Her overall goal is to create new conceptual and methodological tools that help people understand, interrogate, and intentionally engage in social processes. She is currently working on projects related to what I call the “natural-is-better cultural logic”; age as a socially constructed system of inequality; methods to more responsibly measure and interrogate social difference; and the intersectionality of interpersonal perception of social categories.

 

Erin McElroy – Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of Washington. Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. McElroy’s work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, digitality, empire, and racial capitalism in the US and in Romania, alongside housing justice organizing, countermapping, and transnational solidarities. This informs the focus of their manuscript, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, forthcoming with Duke University Press. McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, software, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. Recently the collective published Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance. Commitments to public scholarship also informs McElroy’s work coediting the Radical Housing Journal—an open access publication that foregrounds housing research and organizing transnationally. At UW, McElroy runs the Anti-Eviction Lab, where much of the student and community partner driven research focuses upon Landlord Tech Watch—a platform dedicated to producing collective knowledge about landlord-driven data grabbing and algorithmic techniques. 

These affiliates bring a wealth of knowledge and unique approaches that enhance our community of demographers and collectively advances population science. We look forward to supporting each of them as they pursue their research. You can learn more about their individual research interests by visiting their affiliate pages, linked above.

If you are interested in becoming an affiliate or you know of someone who should become one, you can invite them to do so by directing them to this page. Affiliate applications are reviewed quarterly, by CSDE’s Executive Committee.