Please join us for a seminar with Ayaz Qureshi from the University of Edinburgh, hosted by CSDE, the South Asia Center, and the Population Health Initiative. The devastation resulting from 2022 floods in Pakistan was yet another reminder of the human cost of Climate Change in the South Asian region. More than 32 million people were displaced, 1700 people were killed, 800,000 hectors of crops were destroyed, and over 750,000 livestock animals were lost. Vast areas of land remained under stagnant water for months, resulting in outbreaks of water-borne diseases. Many families took shelter on raised ground along highways in Southern and Western Pakistan. They were forced to spend nights under parked lorries to shelter themselves from rain. As horrific stories of human suffering in these circumstances emerged, a debate ensued in Pakistan on fixing the blame for the disaster. This debate ranged from global capitalist greed to unsuitability of colonial era infrastructures for indigenous water management systems. The Pakistani state rallied behind calls for Climate Change reparations at international forums but local understandings of climate change, and its impacts as well as how to deal with them, were ignored in governmental policy and response. In this talk, Dr. Qureshi will argue for a people-centred approach to understanding and addressing problems of health and displacement resulting from climate change related weather phenomenon.

Ayaz Qureshi is a social and medical anthropologist with interest in infectious disease, sexual and reproductive health, labour relations, NGOs, climate change, migration, and displacement. He has carried out a number of research projects in these areas. His monograph ‘AIDS in Pakistan: Bureaucracy, Public Goods and NGOs’ is the first full length study of HIV/AIDS work in relation to government and NGOs. He has published in discipline leading international academic journals. A full list of his publications can be found here: https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/ayaz-qureshi

CSDE Affiliate David Swanson and his colleague Richard Verdugo led the publication of a new research collection entitled Socio-Demographic Perspectives on the COVID-19 Pandemic (Information Age Publishing) which is now available here.  CSDE Affiliates providing contributions included Sara Curran, Jessica Godwin, Neal Marquez, Arni Rao, David Swanson, and David Takeuchi.  Their chapters cover a range of topics from methodological approaches to substantive comparisons among Native Americans, across race and ethnicity, political divides, community characteristics,

• The Struggle to Obtain Reliable COVID-19 Information, David A. Swanson and Eric G. Tyberg.
• Producing Summary Statistics of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths Over Time: A Note on Using Geometric Measures, Not Arithmetic Ones, Richard Verdugo, Arni S. R. Srinivasa Rao, Steven G. Krantz, and David A. Swanson.
• Modeling and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Local Area Perspective, David A. Swanson.
• A Simple Method for Estimating the Number of Unconfirmed COVID-19 Cases in a Local Area That Includes a Confidence Interval: A Case Study of Whatcom County, Washington, David A. Swanson and Ronald E. Cossman.
• An Early-Warning COVID-19 Alert and Response Protocol for Seasonal Resort Communities, David A. Swanson and Peter A. Morrison.
• Viral Infections, Race, and Age in the United States, Neal Marquez, Jessica Godwin, and Sara Curran.
• Broadband Access During a Pandemic: 2020 U.S. Census Results for the Hopi and Lummi Reservations, David A. Swanson.
• The Relative Risk of Dying From COVID-19 Among Those Infected Reveals a Disturbing Portrait of Both COVID-19 Mortality and Non-COVID-19 Mortality in the United States, David A. Swanson, Dudley Poston, Steven G. Krantz, and Arni S.R. Srinivasa Rao.
• A Danger to Public Health? Republicanism and the COVID-19 Pandemic, David A. Swanson and Eric G. Tyberg.
• U.S. Policy and COVID-19 Cases and Deaths: An Analysis, Richard R. Verdugo, David A. Swanson, Arni Rao, and Steven Krantz.
• Anti-Asian Hate During the Pandemic, Michael P. Huynh, Anne Saw, and David T. Takeuchi.
• America’s Post-Pandemic Future: A Demographic Perspective, David Swanson, Peter A. Morrison, Dudley Poston, Steven Krantz, and Arni Rao.

The UW eScience Institute invites short proposals (1-2 pages) for a remote one-quarter data-intensive research collaboration focusing on extracting insight from large, noisy, and/or heterogeneous datasets. The goal of the Data Science Incubator is to enable new science by bringing together data scientists and domain scientists to work on focused, intensive, collaborative projects. Their team of data scientists provides expertise in state-of-the-art technology and methods in statistics and machine learning, data manipulation and analytics at all scales, cloud and cluster computing, software design and engineering, visualization, and other topics. An information session will be held on Nov. 6th in-person and on Zoom. Learn more here.

The program is open to any faculty, postdoc, staff, or student whose research can be significantly advanced by intensive collaboration with a data science expert. To apply, we require a short project proposal describing the science goals, the relevant datasets, and the expected technical challenges.  The ideal proposal will clearly identify both the datasets involved and the questions to be answered, and will explain how the technical component of the project is critical to delivering exciting new findings. This year we are happy to announce the availability of cloud resources to support the incubator projects and we welcome applications that wish to use cloud computing.