Skip to content
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Population Health Applied Research Fellowship Program for UW Students (03/20/26)

The Population Health Applied Research Fellowship Program supports multidisciplinary teams of students to work on real-world population health challenges. Projects are sourced from external clients who play an important role in structuring project deliverables. Applications for this summer’s cohort will be accepted until 12 PM on March 20, from undergraduate and graduate students across all UW schools and colleges on all three UW campuses.

The Summer 2026 Population Health Applied Research Fellowship team will work closely with stakeholders at the City of Seattle to research strengths and future recommendations to support children-friendly cities. The Population Health Applied Research Fellowship team for summer 2026 will consist of three graduate students and two undergraduates, with supervision by a faculty expert. The project team receives training in research skills and data collection, analysis and presentation to deliver a work product that meets the external client’s needs. The program is an consortium between the Population Health Initiative and the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology (CSDE). Join us for an informational session on February 26, 2026, at the Hans Rosling Center for Population Health from 11 AM – 12 PM. A virtual option is also available. Please RSVP to let us know you will be attending.

This paid fellowship program will offer a multidisciplinary team of undergraduate and graduate students training in data analysis techniques as well as in research and presentation skills while they develop a work product for an external partner.

The team will combine descriptive and spatial data analysis to explore the volume and location of important daily amenities necessary for those with children – childcare facilities, transportation access, schools, laundromats and so forth – with qualitative data collection via interviews with Seattle’s constituents to better understand the needs of children and their caregivers. This research will result in recommendations of areas of improvement in Seattle’s goal of being a child-friendly city and ways child-friendliness can be monitored as time goes on.

Three graduate students and two undergraduate students will compose the fellowship team. They will be supervised by faculty and staff from the Population Health Initiative and the Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology.

 

*New* Call for Proposals: Politics of Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity Consortium (PRIEC) Conference (03/20/26)

Please see below regarding the CFP for an exciting day-long national conference on the the Politics of Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity (PRIEC) slated for Friday, May 8 on the campus of UC Santa Barbara. We welcome proposals that explore a wide range of issues related to the politics of race, immigration, and ethnicity. Proposals may focus on any level of analysis (national, state, local) and any area of the political system (legislative, executive/bureaucratic, judicial). We are especially interested in research that features institutions, governance, and public policy, or examines comparative and/or transnational perspectives with a focus on the U.S., or includes interdisciplinary approaches or community-engaged research. Research that focuses on individual-level political attitudes and political behavior is also welcome.

Deadline: March 20, 2026

See full ad: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdaDBaK0wFSsN0Vnnnb2Q3JPA_9AKZB_U9DN9ioIGV9cAyjBg/viewform

CSDE Spring Seminar Series Schedule

Welcome Spring! CSDE seminars will resume on Friday, April 3, 2026.  You can find the schedule here and you can also subscribe to our Trumba Events to receive regular announcements about CSDE-sponsored events.

CSDE Affiliate Dan Goldhaber (Social Work) will kick off the quarter on April 3 with a talk on “Improving Hiring Decisions: Experimental Evidence on the Value of Reference Information About Teacher Applicants.”  Then on April 10, Bussarawan “Puk” Teerawichitchainan (Sociology & Population Studies, National University of Singapore) will present “Aging with Limited Kin: Childlessness and Care Arrangements in Singapore and Thailand.” Then, Rana Khoury (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) will speak on international aid in Syria’s war on April 17. On April 24, Ninez Ponce (UCLA) will present a qualitative analysis of public feedback on Asian racial categories. In advance of the Population Association of America Annual Meeting 2026, the May 1 seminar session will be devoted to practice talks. There is no seminar on May 8 while the PAA Annual Meeting takes place. The series resumes on May 15 with a seminar by Angela Garcia (The University of Chicago) titled “Enduring Illegality: Time and the State of Waiting in Undocumented Middle Life.” On May 22, Lauren Olsen (Temple University) will present on “The Promises and Pitfalls of Social Scientific Instruction in U.S. Medical Schools.” Jen Rose Smith (University of Washington) will deliver the last seminar of the year, “Ice Geographies and Critical Demography,” on May 29. We will close the 2025-2026 academic year on June 5 with a Celebration of Trainees’ Accomplishments.

 

 

d’Alpoim Guedes Projects that Warming will Exceed the Long-Term Thermal Limits of Rice Cultivation

In a recent article in Nature Communications, CSDE Affiliate Jade d’Alpoim Guedes (Anthropology) assessed how warm temperatures have constrained rice’s distribution and the adaptive strategies used to sustain its production. d’Alpoim Guedes and co-authors drew on contemporary records of rice cultivation, archaeological data spanning rice’s long-term history of cultivation, and temperature projections for the past and future. The thermal limits of rice cultivation have remained consistent throughout rice’s domestication history despite its genetic diversification and geographic expansion. Over the past 9000 years, domesticated Asian rice has rarely thrived where mean annual temperature exceeds 28 °C or warm-season maximum temperature exceeds 33 °C. By the end of this century, projections estimate that the land area exceeding these thermal thresholds could expand by ten to thirty times in Asia’s major rice-producing nations. Rice-dependent regions face unprecedented challenges in maintaining this staple crop under projected warming.

Chi Quoted by CBS News on Effect of Growing Anti-Fluoride Stances

CBS News quoted CSDE Affiliate Donald Chi (Oral Health Services) on an article exploring the increase in children entering ERs for preventable tooth problems. ER visits for tooth problems unrelated to physical injuries rose almost 60% nationally for children under 15 years old from 2019 to 2022. Chi expressed worries that growing anti-fluoride stances will further erode trust in fluoride treatment and result in higher cavity rates. Since the start of 2026, lawmakers in at least 15 states have introduced bills prohibiting or limiting fluoride in public drinking water. Utah and Florida in 2025 became the first states to enact fluoride bans.