ICPSR Summer Scholarships in Quantitative Methods Now Available (2/28/25)
Scholarships for the 2025 Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Summer Program are now open! These scholarships cover one of our General Sessions, where you can curate your own schedule of methods training to fit what you need for your research and goals.
View the full list of scholarships that we offer, along with scholarships offered in partnership with other organizations.
The deadline to apply for a scholarship is Friday, February 28.
Postdoctoral Scholar – University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center (rolling)
*New* Gateway Exposome Coordinating Center (GECC) Offers Pilot Funding (3/1/25)
The new, NIA-funded GECC has pilot project funding available. The GECC facilitates research on the environmental determinants of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and AD-Related Dementials (ADRD) risk, resilience, and disparities, and emphasizes six environmental domains including climate and the physical environment.
Application deadline is March 1.
ASA Sociology of Population Section Student Paper Award (3/1/25)
The American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Population section is accepting nominations for the best student paper in the sociology of population. This award consists of a certificate and $500 award. The paper must use a sociological perspective to address an issue of relevance to contemporary demography, broadly construed; purely technical papers are not eligible. The paper can be published or unpublished and should be article-length (approximately 40 pages including tables and figures). Papers can be sole-authored or have multiple student authors. All authors must be currently enrolled in graduate school or have completed their Ph.D. degrees on or after January 1, 2024. No faculty co-authors are allowed.
Please send a letter of nomination with author name(s), title, date of publication, and a brief statement explaining the significance of the work and its contribution to the sociology of population. Self-nominations are welcome. Nominations and a copy of the article should be emailed to all committee members by March 1, 2025. Membership in the Sociology of Population Section of the ASA is not a requirement for the award but is encouraged.
Karen Benjamin Guzzo (Chair), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, karen.guzzo@unc.edu
Zoya Gubernskaya, University at Albany, zgubernskaya@albany.edu
Ohjae Gowen, Singapore Management University, ohjaegowen@smu.edu.sg
Sophia Chae, University of Montreal, sophia.chae@umontreal.ca
Won-tak Ju, University of Florida, wjoo@ufl.edu
*New* Joint Seminar for Development Economics (JSDE) to Host Natalie Bau (3/3/25)
The Joint Seminar in Development Economics (JSDE) Series will host Dr. Natalie Bau (UCLA) for a talk on Monday, March 3rd entitled “The Long-Term Effects of School Quality in Low-Income Countries: Evidence From 15 Years of Data”. The seminar will take place in person at 11:00am in Savery 410.
Abstract: “Using rich data following children over 15 years in Pakistani villages, we provide the first causal estimates of the effects of attending a better primary school on children’s long-term outcomes in a low-income setting. Exploiting panel test score data, which allow us to estimate and validate value-added measures of school quality, in combination with variation generated by moves across schools, we show that on average being exposed to a school that increases childhood test scores by 1 standard deviation, increases adult test scores by 0.2 standard deviations, total years of schooling by nearly 1 year, the likelihood of still studying as a young adult by 5 percentage points, of graduating high school by 10 ppt, and college enrollment by 5 ppt. A Mincerian exercise suggests that moving the children from the worst school to the best school in a village would generate present discounted wage gains of 280,000 USD for the average village.” Learn more here.
*New* CSDE Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG) Hosts Kivan Polimis on Using Data-Driven Analysis of Retractions to Enhance Transparency and Accountability (02/19/2025)
On Wednesday 2/19 from 9-10 AM, CDWG will host Dr. Kivan Polimis for a research talk. Kivan Polimis is a Data Scientist at Karna and a lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Washington. Dr. Polimis is a computational demographer specializing in the use of non-traditional data such as social media to analyze population dynamics, with a focus on migration patterns. Dr. Polimis’ research leverages statistical frameworks that fuse novel and traditional demographic data to explore how digital interactions reflect demographic trends. The presentation will be entitled “Restoring Trust in Scholarly Research: Using Data-Driven Analysis of Retractions to Enhance Transparency and Accountability.”
Eroding trust in institutions across fields such as academia, journalism, public health, and government poses a significant threat to personal well-being and the integrity of knowledge production. While academia already relies on evaluations like peer-reviewed research, it can further enhance accountability by adopting tools that promote greater researcher accountability. For example, implementing tools to identify articles likely to be retracted due to critical errors or misconduct would help restore public trust in scholarly work. This project integrates data from multiple scholarly databases, including withdrarXiv, Scopus, and Google Citations, to track and analyze metrics of retracted academic articles. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques, the project aims to predict features of withdrawn articles, such as patterns in author behavior, publication fields, and citation dynamics. Additionally, an investigation into how problematic research spreads within academic communities by analyzing publication networks, author movement, and citation relationships is ongoing. The findings presented here are preliminary.
Aging and the Social Brain: The Role of Social Networks in Alzheimer’s Disease – Dr. Brea Perry
When: Friday, Feb 21, 2025 (12:30-1:30PM)
Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here)
1-on-1 meetings: 223 Raitt Hall (sign up here)
We are looking forward to hosting Brea Perry from Indiana University on Friday, Feb. 21 in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. In addition, there are opportunities to meet 1-1 with Dr. Perry throughout the day. Sign up here!
Research suggests social connectedness reduces dementia risk and helps older adults with neuropathology maintain cognitive functionality and quality of life. However, little is known about the specific underlying social and biological mechanisms. This presentation provides an overview of potential pathways through social bridging (i.e., cognitive enrichment through expansive social networks) and social bonding (i.e., neuroendocrine benefits of integration in cohesive social networks). Results from a cohort study of older adults that combines social network methodology with data on general and social cognitive function and neuroimaging biomarkers are presented. These findings provide insight into specific etiological mechanisms and have important implications for cognitive health disparities that can be leveraged to inform policies and programs that support brain health and cognitive function in older adults.
Dr. Brea Perry is the Allen D. and Polly S. Grimshaw Professor in the Department of Sociology, Associate Director of the Irsay Institute for Sociomedical Sciences Research, and the Vice Provost and Associate Vice President for Research at Indiana University. Her research investigates the intersecting influence of social networks, biomarkers, social psychology, and social inequality in health and illness. Brea’s work often focuses on psychological and brain diseases, including neurological disorders common in aging, mental illness, and substance use disorders. Brea has received over $19M in funding from multiple National Institutes of Health, including NIA, NIDA, NIDCR, and NCRR, as well as the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and other charitable foundations. She has served as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Medical Sociology, Series Editor of Advances in Medical Sociology, and Associate Editor of Alzheimer’s & Dementia. She was elected to the Sociological Research Association in 2021 and was a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholar from 2019-2022.
CSDE Welcomes 2 New External Research Affiliates in Winter Quarter 2025
CSDE is pleased to introduce two of our new External Research Affiliates! Michele Cadigan, (Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Arizona State University) utilizes mixed methodologies to examine intersectional inequality at the intersection of the criminal legal system and economic markets, with a primary focus on cannabis legalization and a secondary focus on monetary sanctions. Salene Jones (Associate Professor, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center) is a psychologist whose research focuses on cancer care delivery, the patient experience and quality of life. She is particularly interested in psychometrics, which is the development of valid and reliable questionnaires for patient-reported outcomes to assess pain, depression, anxiety and other facets of quality of life. Learn more about each affiliate in the full story!
Michele Cadigan – Dr. Michele Cadigan’s work utilizes mixed methodologies to examine intersectional inequality at the intersection of the criminal legal system and economic markets, with a primary focus on cannabis legalization and a secondary focus on monetary sanctions. Specifically, she explores how laws and practices in economic markets and the criminal legal system intersect to construct racial meaning and shape inequality at both macro- and meso-levels. Her work has been published in The Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Russell Sage Foundation: RSF Journal for the Social Sciences, and the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. Additionally, her work has been supported by national funding organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy Research.
Salene Jones – Dr. Salene Jones is a psychologist whose research focuses on cancer care delivery, the patient experience and quality of life. She is particularly interested in psychometrics, which is the development of valid and reliable questionnaires for patient-reported outcomes to assess pain, depression, anxiety and other facets of quality of life. A member of the health economics group, the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research, Dr. Jones also examines the association of financial worry and anxiety with outcomes in people with cancer. Her research includes studies of the relationship of health anxiety and fear of cancer to health care use and cancer prevention.