Archives: Affiliates

Jevin West is Associate Professor and Director at the Information School. He builds models, algorithms and interactive visualizations for understanding the flow of information in large knowledge networks. Two particular areas of interest are scholarly communication and intellectual property. Jevin co-founded Eigenfactor.org (www.eigenfactor.org) — a free website and research platform for mapping science and identifying influential papers, journals and scholars. He is also the Co-Director of DataLab, the nexus for research on Data Science and Analytics at the UW iSchool.

He also serves as Affiliate Faculty with the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences and as Adjunct Faculty with Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

Dr. Emma S. Spiro is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Information School, an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, and an affiliate of the UW Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences. Dr. Spiro is a Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at UW. At the UW iSchool Dr. Spiro is co-director of the Social Media Lab (SoMeLab). She is also co-founder and current co-director of the Data Science and Analytics Lab (DataLab). She recently co-founded the Center for an Informed Public (CIP) at UW; the CIP is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort that brings together faculty, staff, students and community partners in service of a core mission aiming to resist strategic misinformation and strengthen democratic discourse. Dr. Spiro studies online communication and information-related behaviors in the context of emergencies and disaster events. Recently, she has focused on investigating misinformation online. Her work also explores the structure and dynamics of interpersonal and organizational networks in both online and offline environments. Dr. Spiro’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and through other gifts. Her research has been published in PNAS, Social Networks, Field Methods, Demography and Information, Communication & Society, as well as in premier conferences such as the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). Dr. Spiro earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine. She also holds a B.A. in Applied Mathematics and a B.A. in Science, Technology, and Society from Pomona College, as well as an M.A. from the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Jennifer Hook (Ph.D. University of Washington, 2006) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California.  Her research areas include gender, family demography, inequality, work-family, social policy, and comparative sociology. Hook focuses on how social contexts, particularly social policies and opportunities in the labor market, impact individuals and families. Her recent work examines the influence of country context on women’s employment, fathers’ time with children, and the division of household labor, as well as the impacts of state policy and practice on foster children’s outcomes and the economic vulnerability of parents involved with the child welfare system. Her research has appeared in journals including the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, and the European Sociological Review.

Her book (co-authored with Becky Pettit of the University of Texas – Austin) Gendered Tradeoffs: Family, Social Policy, and Economic Inequality in Twenty-One Countries (Russell Sage Foundation 2009) was selected as a Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics in 2010. A related paper (also with Pettit) was a finalist for the 2006 Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research.  She has also received the Aldi J.M. Hagenaars Memorial Award given to the best 2015 LIS Working Paper written by a scholar under the age of forty for her manuscript “Incorporating Class into Work-Family Arrangements: Insights from and for Three Worlds.”  And her 2006 paper “Care in context: Men’s unpaid work in 20 countries, 1965-2003” was awarded two ASA Section Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Awards (Sociology of the Family and Sociology of Sex and Gender).

Hook’s work has been funded by grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Sloan Foundation, and the Center for Poverty Research at UC-Davis.  She is the recepient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. In AY 2018-19 she was a fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Sciences Center.

She has served on editorial board of the American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Forces, Social Problems, and Sociological Perspectives. From 2015-2018 she served as Director of Graduate Studies of the Sociology Department, and returned to the role as Co-Director in 2020.

Hook is an award-winning teacher and mentor. She has been awarded the Dornsife General Education Teaching Award (2014) and the USC Mentoring Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students (2020). She regularly teaches Soci 169 Changing Family Forms, Soci 464 Gender & Work, Soci 651 Social Stratification, and Soci 680 Writing for Publication in Sociology.

Ethan Sharygin is a demographer and director of the Population Research Center at Portland State University. Sharygin’s recent work concerns demographic consequences of wildfire, in particular on how first responders can more accurately estimate population in fire zones and how applied demographers can estimate migration in and around disaster areas using innovative small area estimates methods. Sharygin recently collaborated with researchers at the CA Energy Commission on projected population at heightened risk of wildfires due to climate change. He also worked with RAND Corporation and the CA Census on a household survey to collect data on housing, population, and neighborhood quality for program evaluation and to facilitate the incorporation of remote sensing data into demographic estimates methodology after the 2020 census. Additionally, Sharygin contributed to the development of the Community Burden of Disease project, an initiative of the CA Department of Public Health.

Rob Kemp is a Senior Forecast Analyst in the Washington State Office of Financial Management’s Population Unit.

Tiffany Pan is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. Pan earned her PhD in Biocultural Anthropology from University of Washington in 2019. Pan is also an alumna of the CSDE Pre-Doctoral Fellowship program, where she completed her Demographic Methods Certificate in 2019.

Bryan L. Sykes is a Chancellor’s Fellow, the Director of Graduate Studies, and an Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society (and, by courtesy, Sociology and Public Health) at the University of California-Irvine.  He is an Associate Editor for Science Advances (the Open Access version of Science magazine), an Academic Editor for the Public Library of Science (PLOS) ONE, and a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Sociological Perspectives. Professor Sykes has received awards from the Department of Demography at the University of California-Berkeley, the National Board of Medical Examiners, and the Population Association of America. He has been a National Science Foundation Minority Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Washington and a Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Sykes’ research focuses on demography (fertility and mortality), criminology, population health, mass imprisonment, social inequality, and research methodology.  Professor Sykes’ peer-reviewed research has been published in international social science, medical, and general science journals and university presses. His estimates of racial disparities in incarceration were featured in the National Research Council’s landmark report on “The Growth of Incarceration in the United States” and in the first-ever report on racial inequality in exposure to incarceration in “The State of the Union: The Poverty and Inequality Report”, published by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University.

Deleena Patton (Ph.D. University of Washington, 2014) is a Research Manager with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS). Her research areas include child and family well-being, maternal/child health, public assistance, child welfare, and early childhood development. She provides research and evaluation services to DSHS, other state agencies, and policymakers using integrated administrative data in order to improve the lives of Washingtonians.

Dr. Edwin Wong is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Health Services in the School of Public Health. Edwin Wong’s research interests include: health economics, applied microeconometrics, impact of policy interventions on veterans’ healthcare, comparative effectiveness research and cost-effectiveness analysis.

Dr. Edmund Seto received his PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the quantification of exposures and risk as they relate to environmental and occupational health. Using Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial methods, mathematical models, and novel information technologies, Dr. Seto has conducted exposure assessments for built environment studies of air pollution and noise exposures, exposure assessments of infectious agents in global health contexts, and exposure assessments for environmental justice research. A computer scientist by training, his group explores new technologies such as the use of mobile devices and low-cost sensor systems to infer the relationship between individual and population behaviors and how they relate to exposures to environmental and workplace hazards. Dr. Seto’s rapid prototyping lab fosters interdisciplinary collaboration to create new technologies to improve public health. Dr. Seto is Deputy Director of the UW NIEHS Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics, and Environment (EDGE).