This week, we will be joined by CSDE Research Affiliate, Ruoniu (Vince) Wang from the Runstad Department of Real Estate at UW. Dr. Wang will present his talk “Community Land Trust and Shared Equity Homeownership Programs in the U.S”. As communities experience unprecedented housing unaffordability and resident displacement, they are increasingly turning to the community land trust (CLT). CLTs are a unique model for the provision of affordable housing because they aspire to ensure housing remains affordable in perpetuity and that land in trust is community controlled. While previously working for the national organization Grounded Solutions Network, Dr. Wang has led a research team to complete the largest and most comprehensive national census on CLTs and nonprofits with shared equity homeownership programs. In this seminar, Dr. Wang will share highlights from the study about the prevalence, practice, and impacts of the CLT field.

Dr. Wang studies spatial justice and inclusive communities, including their impacts reflected in the built environment, human behaviors, and policy interventions. Dr. Wang joined the University of Washington after serving six years as the research manager and director in a national non-profit organization Grounded Solutions Network. He has designed and conducted a U.S. Census of inclusionary housing policies, a U.S. census of community land trusts, and a national performance evaluation of shared equity homeownership programs. His research expands to policy evaluation for the two largest federal assisted housing rental programs in the U.S.: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program and the Housing Choice Voucher program. Vince grounds his research with applied tools to democratize data for low-income communities.

The CSDE Development Core is happy to announce a Population Research Planning Grant awarded to CSDE Affiliate Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen, Professor in the School of Social Work and a long-time expert on healthy aging among LGBTQ+ adults.

In 2020, Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen worked to establish an international collaboration of researchers in 18 countries across six world regions—from Canada to Japan to Argentina to Nigeria to Pakistan. Collectively, the group piloted online and mail-in surveys about health and life experiences among adult members of sexual and gender minorities in each country. Now, CSDE will be providing financial support to allow Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen and her team to evaluate the pilot study in a host of ways, including cross-country comparisons of data completeness, feasibility and acceptability. The results will help to inform scale-up to a major longer-term international effort at assessing progress and challenges in achieving LGBTQ+ health and well-being across the lifespan. Congratulations to Dr. Fredriksen-Goldsen!

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

Rachel Prusynski – Assistant Professor, Physical Therapy. Her research agenda is to inform equitable policy and facilitate quality evidence-based rehabilitative care to reduce disability, especially for socioeconomically vulnerable patients. She is a health services researcher focusing on relationships between rehabilitation processes and outcomes in post-acute care, with an emphasis on the impact of health policy on therapy practice and patient outcomes. Her work examines policies and system factors impacting the fragmented skilled nursing facility (SNF) industry, where variability in therapy practice and outcomes is especially high and rehabilitation research lags compared to other healthcare settings.

S. Joseph Shin – Assistant Professor, Management at University of Washington, Tacoma. His research focus is on the nexus of organization theory, strategy, and entrepreneurship. He aims to enhance scholarly knowledge about the entrepreneurial growth and scaling of high-growth nascent ventures in technology-based industries known as unicorn ventures. A unicorn venture is a private firm valued at more than one billion dollars. Using an extensive and novel longitudinal dataset and robust identification strategy, he attempts to better understand the antecedents and consequences of ventures’ high growth and fast-paced scaling.

Michelle Shin – Assistant Professor, Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing. Prior to joining UW School of Nursing, she completed postdoctoral training in Population Health Sciences focusing on implementation science and cancer equity with Dr. Jennifer Tsui in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. As a public health nurse researcher with academic background in cervical cancer prevention (human papillomavirus [HPV] vaccination and HPV self-sampling) and clinical experience in safety-net clinic settings, her work focuses on application of implementation science methods to improve cancer care delivery for medically underserved populations.

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 Jon Wakefield, along with co-authors, has published new research in arXiv entitled, “Small Area Estimation with Random Forests and the LASSO”. They consider random forests and LASSO methods for model-based small area estimation when the number of areas with sampled data is a small fraction of the total areas for which estimates are required. Abundant auxiliary information is available for the sampled areas, from the survey, and for all areas, from an exterior source, and the goal is to use auxiliary variables to predict the outcome of interest. Among the four modelling methods considered, the Bayesian shrinkage performed the best in terms of bias, MSE and prediction interval coverages and scores, as assessed through a cross-validation study. Excellent work, Dr. Wakefield!