CSDE Affiliates Rachel Heath (Economics) and Melissa Knox (Economics), received a grant from the Social Science Research Council this week! Retaining women students who express interest in economics classes is an important first step in fixing the “leaky pipeline” of women out of economics at every stage, from introductory economics to full professor. This project will assess whether an intervention that introduces gender-related material into economics courses improves women students’ sense of relevance and belonging, test scores, and continuation in further economics and mathematics classes.
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is hosting a webinar with state and local-level survey programs to discuss experiences in multimode health and nutrition data collection. Multimode data collection can include interviews, physical assessments, and biospecimen collection. The webinar will address topics such as innovative data collection, including novel survey measurements and meaningful community engagement. The collaborative discussions will generate ideas to improve survey participant experience, response rates, efficiency, and outreach. There will be presentations by State and local programs followed by panel discussion and Q&A on issues related to response rates, community engagement, funding, innovative methods, and health equity. Register here!
CSDE Affiliate Karen Chen will present her work, “Urban Form and Mental Health”. Her recent research is focusing on urban environmental change and its related issues: 1) environmental health, mental health; 2) sustainable development in mountainous regions; and 3) open data and science for the Global South. Dr. Chen’s talk is part of the ENV H 580 seminar series and is open to faculty, staff, and the public.
Karen T.H. Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning and the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the University of Washington, where she is also affiliated with the Data Science Program. She is a quantitative geographer enjoying the synergy of machine learning and earth observations (2022 Women in ML4EO). Her recent research is focusing on urban environmental change and its related issues: 1) environmental health, mental health; 2) sustainable development in mountainous regions; and 3) open data and science for the Global South. Dr. Chen’s talk is part of the ENV H 580 seminar series and is open to faculty, staff, and the public. Follow her work on ResearchGate and LinkedIn.
Register for Dr. Chen’s seminar here.
The Department of Anthropology and CSDE are co-sponsoring the Sam Dubal Memorial Lecture. This year’s lecture will be given by Dr. Natali Valdez. Dr. Valdez’s talk is entitled “Weighing the Future: Race, Science and Pregnancy Trials in a Postgenomic Era.” The talk is on Oct. 13 from 1:30-2:50pm and will be online via zoom. Registration information can be found here.
Contemporary clinical trials selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. As the first ethnography of its kind, her book examines the sociopolitical implications of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, illuminating how processes of scientific knowledge production are linked to racism, capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction.
Natali Valdez is a medical anthropologist and science and technology scholar who studies how race, gender, and power are enveloped into scientific knowledge production. She draws from Black feminism and postcolonial feminist science studies to critically examine epigenetic and postgenomic conceptions of the environment in social and biological (re)production. Her current and ongoing research interests include systemic racism, inter/transgenerational trauma, somatic therapy, big data, metabolic illness, and predictive medicine. She is an assistant professor at Purdue University, and this year she is a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University.
CSDE Affiliate Clara Berridge and co-authors recently published two articles on technology use to support an aging population. The first article, “AI Companion Robot Data Sharing: Preferences of an Online Cohort and Policy Implications” is featured in the Journal of Elder Policy, where authors report peoples’ perspectives on small AI companion robots for older adults, along with attendant issues related to facial expression and conversation data collection and sharing. The second, “How I want technology used in my care: Learning from documented choices of people living with dementia using a dyadic decision making tool” is published by the journal Informatics for Health and Social Care, where they draw on the perspectives of people living with dementia. While technologies for aging in place are promoted to support care partners and people living with dementia, perspectives of people living with dementia are underrepresented in both use decisions among families and discussions within academia and industry.
CSDE Affiliate Dan Brown (College of the Environment) recently published a co-authored article in PNAS, titled “Large-scale land acquisitions exacerbate local farmland inequalities in Tanzania”. Land inequality stalls economic development, entrenches poverty, and is associated with environmental degradation. The authors’ paper studies inequalities in land assets, specifically landholdings and farm size, to derive insights into the distributional outcomes of LSLAs. Using a household survey covering four pairs of land acquisition and control sites in Tanzania, they use a quasi-experimental design to characterize changes in land inequality and subsequent impacts on well-being. Their results demonstrate that without explicit consideration of distributional outcomes, land-use policies can systematically reinforce existing inequalities.
Delaney Glass, Ph.D. candidate and NIH T32 Fellow at CSDE was awarded the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant over the summer for her dissertation research “Effects of Extreme Stressors in Adolescence”. This dissertation grant funding is in addition to a Wenner-Gren grant awarded earlier this year. Based in the CSDE Biodemography Lab, her project will examine the embodiment of displacement and poverty-derived psychosocial stressors through the assessment of relationships between pubertal and metabolic hormones among Jordanian non-refugee and Syrian refugee adolescents. Upon completion of the project, she will share research findings with interested stakeholder organizations serving youth communities in Northern Jordan.
CSDE Affiliates Monica Keith (Anthropology) and Melanie Martin (Anthropology) recently published a paper in Women’s Health Issues, titled the “Social Determinant Pathways to Hypertensive Disorders of Pregnancy Among Nulliparous U.S. Women“. The article is a write-up of their winning solution for the NICHD DASH Data Challenge, which was supported by CSDE. The study used data in the NICHD Nulliparous Pregnancy Outcomes Study: Monitoring Mothers-to-Be (n = 6,501) to examine links between upstream social determinants of health, allostatic load during pregnancy, and risk of hypertensive disorders during pregnancy. Our model results demonstrated that the social environment exerted stronger effects on allostatic markers than did individually, behaviorally mediated dietary, exercise, or smoking pathways. Demographic aspects of the social environment (e.g., household income, partnered status) were the most salient predictor of hypertensive risk across groups, but showed stronger effects among Black women.
CSDE Affiliate Sameer Shah (Environmental and Forest Sciences) has just published a co-authored paper in Environmental Research Communications that details the challenges and opportunities in linking environmental and social sciences data to address climate change. They argue that the integration of physical and social science data can enable novel frameworks, methodologies, and innovative solutions important for addressing complex socio-environmental problems. Unfortunately, many technical, procedural, and institutional challenges hamper effective data integration – detracting from interdisciplinary socio-environmental research and broader public impact. The evidence for their claims is based on the experiences of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and their Early Career Researchers.