Archives: Affiliates

Michelle O’Brien (she/her) is a demographer and quantitative social scientist with substantial international experience. She is the Research Manager of the Sexual & Reproductive Health team at the Institute for Disease Modeling within the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. O’Brien’s research has focused on the complex dynamics of women’s health and well-being in contexts of war, violence, and scarce resources. Her work at the Gates Foundation leverages computational demography to better understand the links between individual decision-making, reproductive health products and delivery, and health outcomes. She was a CSDE Fellow and holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington.

Dr. Hess is Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, Global Health and Emergency Medicine at the University of Washington. He serves as the director of the UW Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE). Dr. Hess has an MD and an MPH in global environmental health and is residency-trained and board-certified in emergency medicine.

Dr. Hess is a lead author on several national and international climate assessments, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation and the Sixth Assessment Report. He is also an author on the annual Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change.

He is the principal investigator of an NIH-funded grant supporting work in India on the epidemiology of extreme heat and strategies for developing, implementing and evaluating heat early-warning systems.

Dr. Hess is also a consultant for the Climate and Health Program at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he previously worked as a medical adviser on the health effects of climate change and evidence-based interventions to enhance preparedness and promote climate change adaptation at the state and federal levels. He is a section editor at the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine and a recipient of the Presidential GreenGov award. His work has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the Wellcome Trust and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among other funders.

Dr. Michael Brown is a Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. Brown’s research interests focus on the political and urban aspects of geography, specifically LGBTQ people and communities and their relation to broader populations.

Brown has recently become a co-PI on an NSF-funded project entitled, “Shifting ontologies and spatialities of LGBTQ life,” which will track LGBTQ locations in a sample of US localities from 1965-2014. The goal of this study is to be able to do spatial analysis of the distribution of LGBTQ venues in relation to census and other population-areal datasets, with particular respect to the morphologies of “gayborhoods.”

Dr. Spencer is a Native Hawaiian (Kānaka ‘Ōiwi) researcher and currently serves as the Presidential Term Professor of Social Work and Director of Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Oceania Affairs at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute (IWRI). His current research focus is health equity among Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) populations. Using national data, local data, or community-driven data, Dr. Spencer is interested in understanding both the impact of racism and settler colonial society on NHOPI, he also seeks solutions through participatory interventions. This research is grounded in indigenous cultural practices and values that promote health and wellbeing. For over 25 years, his research with African American, Latinx, Asian, as well as NHOPI communities, in the areas of health and mental health has been funded by numerous federal grants and his scholarly work has been published in high impact medical, public health, social work, and interdisciplinary journals. This work includes two randomized controlled trials demonstrating the effectiveness of a culturally tailored, community health worker intervention (CHW) for African American and Latinx patients with type 2 diabetes. Dr. Spencer’s current research relates to the impact of COVID-19 on the health and economic wellbeing of NHOPI in Washington. A goal of Dr. Spencer is to develop a national data set for NHOPI on health, mental health, and service delivery needs.

Dr. Elizabeth Harrington is a clinician and researcher with expertise in global reproductive health, family planning, and the social and behavioral influences on contraceptive decision-making. She is a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist with subspecialty training in family planning, and her research aims at understanding women’s complex needs and desires around prevention of unintended pregnancy. As a PI, she successfully designed and implemented a behavioral clinical trial of a mobile health contraceptive decision-support intervention in Kenya. She presented this work at the International Workshop on HIV and Adolescence, and prepared a manuscript for submission as first author entitled “Spoiled” girls: Understanding the social context of contraceptive need among Kenyan adolescent girls and young women.

Dr. Harrington recently received a K12 career development award from the NICHD for research entitled, “Reproductive empowerment and contraceptive choice among adolescent girls and young women in Kenya”. The aims of this award are to examine contraceptive preferences and decision-making among adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in Kenya with a focus on reproductive empowerment, and to develop and pilot a tailored intervention to support AGYW’s contraceptive decision-making in community based pharmacies. This work will guide the development of a novel, person-centered approach to unintended pregnancy prevention among AGYW at high risk for poor health outcomes.

Larry Knopp is Professor Emeritus in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences on the Tacoma campus. A geographer by training, his interests are fundamentally interdisciplinary. His research concerns questions of power and place, especially as they pertain to issues of sexuality, gender, class, and other axes of difference. He also studies feminist and queer theories; the theory, politics and practice of mapping queer populations and cultures; the politics of sexual health; and North American cultural and political geographies. He is currently Principal Investigator on a CSDE-administered and National Science Foundation-funded project titled ‘Shifting Geographies of LGBTQ Space’.

Trained as a demographer and sociologist, Xinguang is now an assistant professor of sociology at Peking University of China after receiving a PhD in Sociology from UW.

Xinguang is currently working on several projects related to population dynamics, wellbeing of families and households, mainly including: 1) working with Sara Curran and other scholars. He is working on the population dynamics before and after natural disasters by constructing a new dataset; 2) he is also working on the economic insecurity of Chinese families and its consequences on family stability and child development; 3) using a network approach, his new project investigates the (in)consistency of belief systems within family members based on his publication on intra-family diffusion of discrimination feelings at Social Science Research.

Dr. Manhart’s research interests are in sexually transmitted infections (STI) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Her primary research involves defining the clinical epidemiology of emerging STI pathogens, with a focus on Mycoplasma genitalium. She led the MEGA trial evaluating the efficacy of standard therapies against M. genitalium, and is currently leading two cohort studies of men with urethritis to explore the role of the male urethral microbiome in genital tract disease. Current projects also include studies of the psychosocial implications of STI and HIV-infection, including stigma and mental health, and studies to define the social context of STI risk.

Dr. Darcy Rao is an infectious disease epidemiologist with training and experience in mathematical modeling of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and measurement of sexual behavior and healthcare utilization. Her research interests center on using mathematical models to bridge epidemiologic research and public health practice, with the goal of informing the design and implementation of effective programs and policies. Her current projects include clinical research to evaluate alternate service delivery models for cervical cancer screening among women living with HIV in Washington State, mathematical modeling of HIV and HPV co-infection dynamics to inform cervical cancer prevention in low- and middle-income countries, cost-effectiveness analyses of cervical cancer prevention strategies, and examination of changes in healthcare utilization and sexual behavior associated with COVID-19 social distancing and other mitigation strategies.