CSDE is pleased to welcome back some of our former T32 trainees and fellows as External Research Affiliates! Elizabeth Pelletier’s research is motivated by her interest in how policy shapes economic instability, inequality, and wellbeing. (Census Bureau Economist, Income Statistics Branch). Callie Freitag (Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison) focuses on social policies related to aging, disability, and poverty in the United States. Ian Kennedy’s (Assistant Professor, University of Illinois) work aims to contribute to understandings of how contemporary racism, sexism, and transphobia works, in both visible and less visible ways. Learn more about each affiliate below.

• Elizabeth Pelletier – Elizabeth Pelletier is a Census Bureau Economist in the Income Statistics Branch. She recently graduated with her PhD from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. Her research is motivated by her interest in how policy shapes economic instability, inequality, and wellbeing. Her dissertation focuses on paid leave policies, and specifically how they affect employment and economic wellbeing among parents of newborns. Much of her work uses large administrative microdata, and some projects specifically explore how tools from data science and computational demography can be used to make these records more useful to social scientists. Prior to starting at UW, She was a researcher at the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., where she used data on state criminal justice systems to inform policy debates about mass incarceration and justice reform. Before that, she researched education funding in Canadian provinces as a Fulbright grantee at the University of Toronto. She also has a B.A. in Public Policy and Film Studies from the College of William & Mary and a M.S. in Public Policy and Management from the University of Washington.
• Callie Freitag – Callie Freitag is a mixed-methods policy researcher and demographer. Her work focuses on social policies related to aging, disability, and poverty in the United States. She has a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management from the University of Washington, where she also earned Graduate Certificates in Disability Studies and Demographic Methods.
• Ian Kennedy – Ian Kennedy is a computational social scientist trained working at the intersection of race, digital platforms, and text analysis. Their work aims to contribute to understandings of how contemporary racism, sexism, and transphobia works, in both visible and less visible ways. This means looking for data in new places, like in Craigslist rental ad texts, by developing new uses for large-scale administrative data, or curating large samples of twitter data linked to election misinformation, or through analysis of millions of reddit comments. They are committed to producing useful work beyond scholarly publications, working with groups like the Northwest Justice Project to identify illegal Craigslist ads or with the Election Integrity Partnership to monitor misinformation during the 2020 election.

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is seeking to appoint a full-time post-doctoral researcher to join the ERC-funded Research Group on Migration and Health Inequalities. The group, led by Silvia Loi, brings together experts from Demography, Quantitative Sociology, and Social Epidemiology to address the pressing scientific and societal question: Why do immigrants age in poorer health compared to non-immigrants? We are seeking a creative, self-driven, collaborative scholar with a strong quantitative background that can contribute to advancing one or more of these three research areas:

• quantify the gaps in healthy ageing trajectories between immigrants and non-immigrants by age, gender, socioeconomic status, and their interactions;
• identify the critical events and circumstances in immigrants’ lives that put them on a different healthy ageing trajectory from non-immigrants;
• study the impact of family composition and family ties in mitigating health inequalities by migration background.

For more information: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/career_6122/jobs_fellowships_1910/post_doctoral_researcher_13447

In order to receive full consideration, applications should be submitted by October 31, 2024.

For inquiries about the position, please contact Silvia Loi at loi@demogr.mpg.de.

When: Friday, Nov 1, 2024 (12:30-1:30PM)

Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here)

We are looking forward to hosting CSDE Training Core PI and Research Affiliate Audrey Dorélien (Sociology, UW) on Friday, November 1st in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. 

In this presentation, Audrey Dorélien will discuss the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions and protective health behaviors, such as the use of face masks and physical distancing, on COVID-19 dynamics is well-documented, but sub-group heterogeneities in the adoption of these behaviors remains understudied. In this paper, we describe partisan differences in the adoption of protective health behaviors, and model how these differences can impact the dynamics of COVID-19. Dr. Dorélien will be joined by her research collaborator and PhD student Chris Soria. They will leverage uniquely detailed survey data on partisanship, contact rates, mask usage, and vaccination rates to provide empirical evidence of partisan differences in these health behaviors. They will show that partisan differences in health behaviors are greater than racial and gender differences. We incorporate these observations into a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model framework, that explicitly incorporates partisanship, to identify the most significant mechanisms driving disease spread. They will compare a population without modeled group behavior differences to one that explicitly models differing health behaviors reflecting Republican and Democrat divides. Their findings emphasize the importance of considering partisanship in modeling frameworks, for guiding public health policy and the design of effective mitigation measures, and highlight the role of partisan identification in shaping the course of future pandemics..

Audrey Dorélien is an associate professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Washington. Previously she taught at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota for 10 years. Dorélien’s research agenda strives to elucidate how human population dynamics and behavior intersect with environmental conditions to affect health. Her work describes demographic and health patterns and attempts to identify causal factors responsible for these patterns. The first strand of her research focuses on the effects of early life exposures (i.e., disease/nutrition/climate) on health both in the United States and in Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, she analyzes how human behavior and population dynamics affect the spread and severity of infectious diseases. Third, Professor Dorélien has conducted research on spatial demography/ urbanization with a focus on health and climate change vulnerability. Her research has appeared in Population Development Review, Demography, Population Health Metrics, Biodemography and Social Biology, Demographic Research, and PLoS ONE.

Chris Soria is a PhD student in Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he previously earned a BA in Sociology. His research focuses on how social networks affect health and mortality, particularly in relation to cognitive health and dementia among aging populations. Soria uses causal inference methods to study the influence of personal social networks on cognitive aging and health disparities. Additionally, his work examines mortality and disease inequalities among different groups, including political partisans, socially isolated individuals, and migrants. One of his goals is to understand how diversity within social networks can uniquely and positively impact health outcomes.

The Population Association of America (PAA) Applied Demography Conference has a Call for Papers closing today. PAA invites participation from anyone whose work intersects with population studies, whether in the academic, government, non-profit, or private sector, and at all levels of seniority. Learn more here.

The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) recently released the 2024 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) data via IPUMS CPS and the 2023 American Time Use Survey’s Eating and Health Module via IPUMS ATUS. IPUMS CPS now includes the 2024 ASEC data as well as August and September BMS samples and telework variables. The 2023 ATUS Eating and Health module has also been released, which provides insight into decisions on eating patterns, grocery shopping, and meal preparation, along with the economic and health status of individuals and households. Learn more here.

Housing affordability and homelessness continue to be top priorities for policymakers at multiple levels of government. Findings from a recent book co-authored by CSDE Affiliate Gregg Colburn (Real Estate) that addresses these pressing issues were featured in Episode 2 of the HomeLAnd podcast. Dr. Colburn was also recently invited to participate in a Housing Policy Roundtable at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to share his work. Learn more about the book here.