Patricia Louie is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the role that social factors play in driving racial disparities in physical and mental health. In one stream of research, she focuses on the role of stress and coping resources in explaining Black-White differences in mental health. In a second stream of research, she complicates how race is used as a variable in health disparities research by considering how different specifications of race (such as skin tone or disaggregated multiracial status) can influence how we understand race-health relationships. Currently, Louie is using a cross-national comparative approach to understand how race as a social status plays out across countries with different racial compositions, race and migration histories, and social welfare systems. This project advances the study of racism as a social determinant of health by examining the meaning as well as the implications of race as a system of social stratification across nation states.
Louie’s research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, and American Journal of Epidemiology. To date, she has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ($105,000), the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research, and the Canadian Sociological Association.
Dafeng Xu is an Assistant Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance. Dafeng specializes in data science, and his areas of research include urban and regional policy, immigration policy, and the social and economic history of the United States.
Dafeng’s ongoing research is focused on developing and employing data science tools to link individual records between census, administrative, and survey data. Two projects using methods in data science include linking 1920 and 1930 U.S. census data, and linking 1940 U.S. census data to Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Based on these projects, Dafeng studies the social and economic impacts of urban and regional immigration policies. Study of these policies include how U.S. immigration restriction laws in the 1920s impacted immigrants’ segregation patterns, cultural assimilation, and how local governments responded to natural disasters.
Dafeng received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University in 2016, with a minor in demography. He received his Master’s in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University in 2011. Prior to joining the Evans School in 2019, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Anne Conway is the Urban Child Institute Endowed Professor and Director of the Child and Youth Development Lab (https://utkresearch.wixsite.com/c-ydevelopmentlab) in the College of Social Work at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She studies the development of neurocognition (i.e., focusing attention and ignoring distractions) and self-regulation (i.e., self-management of emotion, behavior, sleep), and associations with child well-being, health, and educational outcomes. Her research has been published in leading journals including Child Development, Psychological Science, Journal of Affective Disorders, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, among others. She has reported findings documenting pronounced disparities in neurocognition based on parental income and education in children entering kindergarten throughout the United States. She has also reported numerous findings on distinct links between early parenting and child temperament in the prediction of children’s neurocognition, emotion regulation, sleep, and mental health. Her most recent paper is currently in press at the journal Developmental Neuropsychology “Longitudinal associations between parenting and inattention, impulsivity, and delay of gratification in preschool aged children: The role of temperamental difficultness and toddler attention focusing” DOI: 10.1080/87565641.2020.1797042.
Avanti Adhia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. She received her doctorate in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. The goal of her research is to prevent interpersonal violence by (1) understanding its causes and consequences and (2) evaluating the role of laws, policies and interventions in reducing violence. She uses multiple, interdisciplinary methods to examine the social and structural determinants of intimate partner violence and sexual violence.
Valentina Petrova received a MAIS from the Jackson School of International Studies, and an MPA from the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington. Prior to her studies at UW, Petrova earned a BA in both Political Science, and Communication with an emphasis in print/broadcast journalism at Pacific Lutheran University. Currently, Petrova provides qualitative data analysis software consulting services to researchers at her consulting firm, QDA Consulting. Petrova also works as a Qualitative Team Lead at VA Puget Sound Health Care System where she leads qualitative teams through research cycles including proposal writing, data collection, coding, analysis, and findings dissemination. Her work also includes training primary investigators and other research staff on data collection (grounded interviewing style) and analysis (various ATLAS.ti 8 topics).
John Leverso is an Assistant Professor at Whitman College in the Department of Sociology. Leverso completed his PhD in Sociology at the University of Washington in 2020. From 2014-2019, he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Leverso’s research combines sociological and criminological perspectives to investigate street gang culture, specifically: gangs in online settings, interaction rituals, solidarity and hyper-surveillance, gangs in the life course, and the geographical correlates of street gangs.
Wendy Barrington is an Associate Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing in the School of Nursing, and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Epidemiology and Health Services in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington. The focus of Barrington’s research is to evaluate to what degree social position, structures, and systems perpetuate cancer health disparities via stress, obesity, and related behaviors. Her research falls within two main schema: promoting healthy communities and racial disparities in clinical outcomes. Barrington uses advanced methods including multilevel modeling and causal mediation analyses to explicate these relationships as well as community-engaged research to promote the health of vulnerable communities. Barrington is also active within the School of Nursing and the broader UW Health Sciences to facilitate an institutional culture that fosters equity, diversity, and inclusion among students, staff, and faculty.
David Takeuchi is a sociologist with postdoctoral experience in epidemiology and health services research. He has extensive research experience in different community and institutional settings and been a key investigator of some of the largest studies of different racial and ethnic groups. He has had extensive experience in research design, sampling strategies for diverse populations, and data analyses using different statistical methods. Professor Takeuchi has written extensively on issues related to the unequal distribution of health and illness in society, particularly around race, ethnic, and socio-economic status (SES). He is an elected member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, the Sociological Research Association, an honor society of the nation’s top sociologists, and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, an honor society of researchers who do work related to social work issues. He has received the Legacy Award from the Family Research Consortium for his research and mentoring and the Innovations Award from the National Center on Health and Health Disparities for his research contributions. In 2011, he received the UW Marsha Landolt Distinguished Mentor Award. He is also a recipient of the Leonard Pearlin Award for Distinguished Contributions of the Sociological Study of Health from the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the ASA Distinguished Contributions to the Study of Asian American Communities.
Yeon Jung Yu is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western Washington University. As a cultural and medical anthropologist with a background in Public Health, Women-Gender studies, and East Asian studies, Dr. Yu’s research interests lie in social networks, sex work, HIV/AIDS, drug use, and social stigma. A sampling of her current projects include: social networks of female sex workers, inequalities in the webcam modeling industry, physical and mental health of trafficked women in the sex trade, and recreational drug use culture among college students.
Dr. Yu earned her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, and is currently writing a book based on her dissertation with the working title Enmeshed: Social Networks and the Integration of Female Sex Workers in Post-Socialist China. Her work is focused on extensive field research on “hidden” rural-to-urban migrant women working in the sex trade in contemporary China.
Dr. Horacio Duarte graduated from Harvard College, where he studied biological anthropology and developed an interest in global health and infectious diseases. After college, he pursued his MD at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. During that time, he spent a year at the National Institutes of Health as a clinical research training program fellow, studying cardio-metabolic disease in HIV-infected adults, as well as treatment adherence in pediatric HIV patients in Latin America. In July 2011, he began his pediatric residency training at the University of Washington, where he also completed his pediatric infectious diseases fellowship. One of Dr. Duarte’s main research interests is using mathematical modeling and cost-effectiveness analysis to improve health policy and resource allocation decisions in low- and middle-income countries, with a current focus on HIV-related health outcomes.