If you’d like to keep up with the new ARPA-H (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health) and what’s happening in the domain of federal funding for health innovation, here is the link for signing up for their regular newsletter – Vitals. ARPA-H says that Vitals is the one way to stay updated on ARPA-H, learn about opportunities, and to send queries about challenges and solutions.

The Department of Defense (DoD), General Services Administration (GSA), and NASA have issued an interim rule for federal contracts that prohibits the presence or use of ByteDance applications or services, including the social networking service TikTok, by federal contractors. This interim rule applies to federal contracts awarded or modified on or after June 2, 2023.

When the FAR clause (FAR 52.204-27) is incorporated into the contract terms, this ban applies not only to equipment owned by the UW and used on the project, but also any personal devices contractors may use when carrying out the project. We highly recommend that Principal Investigators working on a federal contract with the clause inform their research teams (including students), to avoid using their personal devices for UW business pertaining to these federal contracts. This includes emails, calls, texts, viewing data, or any project-related activity performed with their personal devices.

UW systems, equipment and technology do not have the barred software or services installed. We recommend strict use of UW-owned systems, equipment and technology for any project that includes this ban.

If this poses a practical difficulty, another option to adhere to this requirement is to ask individuals who may use a personal device for the federal contract- related activity to uninstall the TikTok app (or any other ByteDance app/service) from that personal device for the duration of the contract on which they participate.

OSP and OR continue to monitor the issuance of the final rule, at which time further guidance may be provided.

CSDE’s Executive Committee is pleased to introduce four of our new UW Faculty Affiliates:

Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen – Incoming Assistant Professor, University of Washington; Donnelley Postdoctoral Associate, Yale University. Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen is an interdisciplinary data scientist and geographer interested in urbanization, changing landscape, and impacts on human health. She has developed remote sensing approaches combined with machine-learning in order to characterize forms of cities, not only at large scales but also a spatially-explicit resolution close to people’s living environment (e.g., type of housing within walking distance around homes) to understand health disparities.
Alison Fohner – Assistant Professor, Epidemiology. As an epidemiologist with multidisciplinary training in genomics, pharmaceutics, bioethics, and data science, she is passionate about identifying sources of individual variability in biomarkers and disease risk, and translating those discoveries into better therapies and population screening. The setting for her research is primarily the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS), where she has conducted several epidemiologic investigations over the past several years, primarily focused on outcomes related to dementia and cognition. She is the PI of a K01 grant from the National Institute for Aging focused on identifying plasma proteomic biomarkers associated with cognitive decline and dementia within the CHS cohort. In addition to her work with the CHS, she partners with communities in the Yukon Kuskokwim River Delta of Alaska to evaluate the influence of diet-derived poly-unsaturated fatty acids on vitamin D levels and drug metabolism.
Kristian Jones – Assistant Professor, School of Social Work. Kristian Jones’ program of research examines how youth mentoring can be utilized to promote positive outcomes for Black youth. His current research focuses on how community-based youth mentoring programs promote social justice in the communities they serve. As a Black male scholar, Jones’ research is grounded in his passion for equity and inclusion, specifically as it relates to marginalized youth. Prior to joining the faculty at the UW School of Social Work, Jones received his PhD in social work from the University of Texas at Austin, his master’s of education in counseling from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Albany State University in Albany, GA.
Julianne Meisner – Assistant Professor, Global Health; Assistant Professor, Epidemiology; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences; Clinical Affiliate Professor, Veterinary Medicine. Julianne Meisner is a veterinarian and epidemiologist and early-stage investigator. Her research combines her dual training to tackle complex questions surrounding human health risks at the human-animal-environment interface, largely focused on the effect of livestock keeping on human health among rural communities. Her position as a veterinarian in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington is unique, simultaneously fostering both independence and innovation in her research, and depth in her collaborative network. Her burgeoning research track is situated within both epidemiologic methods and One Health research, affording her the opportunity to bridge gaps between these two communities and identify nuances inherent to research questions at the human-animal-interface that have been previously overlooked.

These affiliates bring a wealth of knowledge and unique approaches that enhance our community of demographers and collectively advances population science. We look forward to supporting each of them as they pursue their research. You can learn more about their individual research interests by visiting their affiliate pages, linked above.

If you are interested in becoming an affiliate or you know of someone who should become one, you can invite them to do so by directing them to this page. Affiliate applications are reviewed quarterly, by CSDE’s Executive Committee.

CSDE Affiliate Rawan Arar recently published an article in the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies entitled “Contrasting Trajectories of Incorporation: Refugee Integration and the Global South” which examines how the challenges of making a home in a foreign country are not unique to refugees in the Global South, their trajectories of integration in Southern host states often diverge from descriptions in the canonical literature on immigrant integration. Arar asks the question: what constitutes integration when newcomers share a language, cultural similarities, religious practices, and family ties with the receiving society? Drawing on ethnographic and interview data with Syrian refugees in Jordan, this article illustrates (a) the complexities that surface when refugees share similarities with members of the receiving community, (b) emerging axes of difference-making, and (c) distinct mechanisms linking humanitarian intervention with the facilitation and impediment of integration. Fantastic work, Rawan!

The University of Minnesota’s IPUMS team has newly-released health data from two sources. The IPUMS MEPS (Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Data for Social, Economic, and Health Research) now includes over 70 new variables from the Prescribed Medicines file from 1996 to the present. These variables include information on medication type, drug name, amounts paid per medication fill, and more. They have also released new variables from IPUMS NHIS, which now includes over 600 variables from the 2022 National Health Interview Survey.

CSDE External Affiliates Amy Bailey and Ryan Gabriel, along with Co-authors, have published a new article in Demography examining the relationship between the lynching of African Americans in the southern United States and subsequent county out-migration of the victims’ surviving family members across 5 decades. In the article entitled, “The Migration of Lynch Victims’ Families, 1880–1930”, they use U.S. census records and machine learning methods to identify the place of residence for family members of Black individuals who were killed by lynch mobs between 1882 and 1929 in the U.S. South. Congratulations, Ryan and Amy!

CSDE staff Jessica Godwin and Tiffany Pan, along with Co-authors, recently released new research in Child Abuse & Neglect entitled “Associations Between Childhood Maltreatment and Physiological Dysregulation in Adulthood: Methodological Decisions and Implications”. Using multiple dimension reduction approaches to quantify physiological dysregulation from multiple biomarker outcomes and different measures of exposure to childhood maltreatment, they discover that the significance and magnitude of effects varied by both dimension reduction method and measure of maltreatment. Biomarker data used in this analysis was assayed by former CSDE staff, Eleanor Brindle. Wonderful job!