CSDE Affiliate Isabelle Cohen will be leading harmonized impact evaluations of two interventions focused on delaying child marriage in West Africa. She will work with the Centre for Girls Education and Economics PhD candidate T.V. Ninan to evaluate the Pathways to Choice model in northern Nigeria, and with CARE and Evans PhD student and CSDE Trainee Jiayuan Wang to evaluate the Re-IMAGINE model in southern Niger. These interventions are designed to mirror each other, subject to contextual adaptations and focus on empowering adolescent girls to return to school through safe spaces-based interventions. Both evaluations are funded by the Gates Foundation.

The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program has expanded its data available for research to now include information from more than 633,000 participants – a 50% increase from the previous release. These updates enhance the program’s vast and comprehensive dataset, one of the largest globally, to accelerate discoveries that will help tackle complex health challenges.

Updates include:

• The program’s genomic dataset has grown by nearly 70% to include whole genome sequences from more than 414,000 participants. Within this extensive collection, there are more than 1.2 billion genetic variants, including more than 200 million previously unreported genetic variants.
• The number of people with Fitbit data has quadrupled to include information from nearly 60,000 participants. This is the world’s largest publicly available Fitbit dataset, already driving insights on lowering risk for chronic diseases.
• New mental health survey data from 110,000 participants and cognitive task data from 36,000 is also now available to advance and improve how mental disorders are defined, diagnosed, and treated.

The All of Us Researcher Workbench is America’s health research platform, currently powering more than 16,000 studies with tools to support transparent and reproducible science. In total, more than 16,000 researchers from all 50 states and more than 1,100 organizations worldwide are registered to use All of Us data.

Although planners and researchers have paid increasing attention to healthy and sustainable buildings in recent years, sub-standard development continues to be a problem in some settings and a common definition of healthy urban development remains elusive. In a recent article, CSDE Affiliate Helen Pineo (Urban Design & Planning) and colleagues argue that case studies focused on healthy development have a unique value when shared in a manner that encourages critical examination and discussion. This study, published in Planning Practice & Research, leverages a narrative synthesis and critical analysis of published cases. Read the full article here.

CSDE will be hosting its annual “PAA 2025 Practice Talks” during the CDWG time on Wednesday, April 2^nd from 10:00-11:00 AM in Raitt 223 as well as during the regular Seminar time on Friday, April 4th from 12:30-1:30 PM in PAR 360. The Wednesday Event is Hybrid, you are welcome to join in person or via Zoom.

We will feature 4 CSDE Trainees representing Sociology and Health Services giving Oral or Flash presentations this year.

• Courtney Allen, Sociology
• Zoe Pleasure, Health Services
• Adam Visokay, Sociology
• Elizabeth Nova, Sociology

4/2/2025

10:00-11:00 AM PT

223 Raitt Hall

The Friday event is an in-person only event. We will feature 3 CSDE Trainees representing Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Sociology giving Oral or Flash presentations this year.

• David Coomes, Epidemiology
• Katie Paulson, Biostatistics
• Jessica Warren, Sociology

04/04/2025
12:30-1:30 PM PT

360 Parrington Hall

Please come listen to their practice presentations and offer them your good feedback and wisdom. Your time and insights will be appreciated.

Environmental NGOs in the Arctic access, analyze, and share satellite imagery to track marine mammal migrations, map coastal inundations for Indigenous communities, pinpoint sources of pollution, and visualize the effects of climate change. While analysis of satellite data can support regional governance and environmental management, it risks distancing these organizations from the communities and ecologies for which they advocate unless attention is given to designing locally-informed rather than data-driven research. In a recent article published in Digital Geography & Society, CSDE Affiliate Mia Bennett (Geography) explores how these NGOs derive meaning and power from satellite imagery through analysis of interviews and correspondence with six Arctic environmental NGOs in 2024. Read the full study here.

The Human Mortality Database Project team invites contributions to the 7 th HMD Symposium. This year, the Symposium will be dedicated to investigating the main drivers and obstacles to longevity progress in the pre- and post-COVID eras. Contributions from demographers, epidemiologists, public health experts and researchers from related fields conducting analyses based on the cause-of-death series newly integrated into the Human Mortality Database (HMD) are particularly encouraged. The Symposium seeks to address major topics and challenges of substantive research as well as methodological and data issues. In addition to contributing to the scientific program, participants will be invited to provide feedback and suggestions on the currently available content of the database and on the methods used, as well as to propose future developments for the HMD Project in general and the Human Cause-of-Death series in particular. Learn more here.