CSSS will be hosting Trey Causey for a seminar on Wednesday, Jan. 24th at 12:30 in 409 Savery Hall and on Zoom (register here). Trey Causey completed his concentration in social statistics at CSSS while a PhD student in Sociology at UW. He currently is the Head of Responsible AI and Senior Director of Data Science at Indeed, the world’s #1 job site in the world and has worked at the intersection of statistics, data science, and machine learning in sports, at startups, and at large social media platforms. Learn more about the talk here.

Abstract: This talk will be a mix of one CSSS alumnus’s career journey through the tech industry, how CSSS prepared me to work in data science and machine learning, and to lead Indeed’s Responsible AI team. I’ll discuss navigating non-academic careers in both boom times and lean times and also dive into some of the methodological specifics of what working in responsible AI entails.

 

 

The NMFS-Sea Grant Joint Fellowship Program in Population and Ecosystem Dynamics and Marine Resource Economics places PhD students studying in one of two priority areas in three-year, research-based fellowships. The program is designed to fulfill workforce development needs identified by the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and since 1990 has provided opportunities for 126 PhD students. The fellowship period will occur between Aug 1st of 2024 to July 31st of 2027 and applications are due on Jan 25th of 2024.

Join UW South Asia Center and UW Center for Southeast Asia and Its Diasporas for a seminar by Kalyani Ramnath (University of Georgia) on Thursday, Jan 25th from 3:30-5:00 PM in 317 Thompson Hall. For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.

Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.

Kalyani Ramnath is Assistant Professor of History at University of Georgia.

Applications are now open for the University of Washington Future Rivers graduate training program beginning Autumn quarter 2024! Any prospective (incoming fall quarter 2024) or current PhD or Masters students in any discipline at the University of Washington are encouraged to apply. Future Rivers is a graduate training program building skills in data science, science communication, and social justice to bridge work across all fields to better solve today’s freshwater sustainability challenges. It is a one-year program that is undertaken alongside any chosen graduate degree. They offer up to 18-months of full funding on a competitive basis. Applications can be submitted anytime; however, to be considered for funding, submissions need to be received by January 26, 2024.

They request a 1-2 page statement of interest from prospective students and a letter of support from a potential advisor (for new students) or current advisor (for currently enrolled students) – further details can be found in the application form. For additional program information or questions about the application process, please contact futurerivers@uw.edu or visit futurerivers.uw.edu.

The Washington Center for Equitable Growth (WCEG) announced an RFP for research grants for early career scholars. Through this new competitive grant program, Equitable Growth seeks to invest in early career scholars whose research agendas are policy relevant, related to how inequality affects economic growth, and who are interested in engaging with nonacademic audiences. Early career scholars are defined as graduate students currently in the dissertation stage of their graduate career and scholars at a U.S. college or university whose Ph.D. was issued within the past 8 years. Evans researchers have received support from WCEG – so be sure to check this out. The deadline to apply is 11:59pm EST on January 29, 2024.

Join CSDE and the Population Health Initiative (co-sponsor), for a seminar by Dr. Rachel Wilbur (Washington State University) on Friday, Jan. 19th from 12:30-1:30 PM in 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here). There will be several opportunities to meet with Dr. Wilbur throughout the afternoon, including 1-1 meetings (sign up for 1-1 meetings here) and a graduate student lunch/discussion from 1:30-2:30 in Raitt 221. RSVP to Maddie Farris to attend the lunch (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). All in-person attendees will have the opportunity to get their CSDE seminar punch card and earn an opportunity to be entered into a prize raffle.

American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) collectively experience some of the greatest inequities in health of any population in the US, including lower life expectancy and a greater burden of many preventable diseases. The root of contemporary AI/AN health patterns extends beyond classic public health emphases on social determinants of health, and instead derives distally from histories of colonization and subsequent subjugation. Commonly referred to as “historical trauma,” intergenerational experiences of trauma and adversity have been shown to compound contemporary social determinants of health, contributing to the inequities we see today. The first part of this talk details a study on the intergenerational physical health impacts of exposure to the Federal Indian Boarding Schools as a historical trauma event at the levels of AI/AN individual, family, and community. The study is based on data collected as part of the Honor Study and included survey responses from 447 AI/AN individuals from 7 urban centers, analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results indicate that, while there are deleterious impacts of exposure to the boarding schools, AI/ANs are actively engaging with histories of trauma, practicing agency in promoting wellbeing for themselves and future generations. In the second part, we build on lessons learned through the study, specifically, how deficit-based models of Indigenous health contribute to the perpetuation of health inequities and introduce alternative, strengths-based approaches as a means of countering harms and supporting Indigenous wellbeing, focusing on health survivance as a concept with increasing salience for Indigenous communities and scholars.