CSDE has awarded five Population Research Planning Grants so far! CSDE Affiliates Drs. Gregg Colburn and Rebecca Walter were awarded matching funds to help with finishing their current book project on Affordable Housing. They describe the book project as “the first comprehensive affordable housing text that is relevant for both teaching and community partners”. CSDE Affiliate Dr. Chiyoung Lee was awarded funds to cover publication fees in her work on biomarkers of depression in the 20-year long prospective cohort study Heart and Soul. CSDE Affiliate Dr. Gregory Bratman was awarded funds to organize a major workshop on the causal pathways of nature and population health via olfaction. This understudied area of population health has many implications, as Bratman describes “In addition to the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards (e.g. fuel refineries, transportation corridors, and wildfire smoke), the health benefits provided by access to nature are topics of critical concern for environmental justice.” CSDE Affiliate Dr. Jennie Romich and CSDE Trainee Callie Freitag were awarded funds to convene a meeting of Washington Merged Longitudinal Administrative Dataset (WMLAD) stakeholders, building on the interest expressed by Washington State Senator Manka Dhingra in identifying state funds to support and grow this resource. If you’d like to join that meeting, visit this page to indicate your interest.
We will not be hosting a CSDE Seminar this week as we participate in the annual Population Association of America conference. If you’re attending the PAA, join us for a CSDE Reception on April 13 from 6-8pm at the Higgins Hotel’s Rosie’s on the Roof.
Look to join us next week (4/21/23), when we host Dr. Asad Islam (Monash University) for a seminar entitled “Forced Displacement, Mental Health, and Child Development: Evidence from the Rohingya Refugees.”
The Max Planck are pleased to invite applications to a 3.5-year University of Manchester doctoral studentship
in Social Statistics. The studentship is jointly funded by the Social Statistics Department, University
of Manchester, UK, and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Germany,
one of the world-leading research centres in population sciences. The studentship will be part of
the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRSPHDS) https://www.imprs-phds.mpg.de/
In many countries, migration has become a key driver of population change. However, traditional
data on migration often lack precision, are biased or are reported with large delays. Digital traces
and big data often contain information on human mobility but new methods are required to use
and integrate these new forms of data with data derived from traditional sources. This is an
excellent opportunity for highly-motivated and qualified candidates to work with an international
team on developing cutting-edge novel statistical and computational methods in estimating and
forecasting human migration with the use of traditional and new forms of data.
This is a Split-Site Studentship and the successful candidate will spend the first 21 months at the
Social Statistics Department, University of Manchester. They will be working in a vibrant
community of PhD students in Social Statistics, Social Data Analytics and Biosocial Research.
They will participate in research activities of the Department, such as seminars and research awaydays, and will have an opportunity to teach as a Graduate Teaching Assistants. The remaining 21
months of the studentship will be spent at the MPIDR in the Department of Digital and
Computational Demography
The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is recruiting one highly qualified
postdoctoral researcher within the Kinship Inequalities Research Group. The position is offered
for three years. This group, led by Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, studies how differences in kinship
among persons and groups determine individual outcomes and shape social structures. It aims
to bring together experts from areas like Demography, Sociology, Anthropology, Mathematics,
Statistics, Computer Science, Biology, etc. to advance the subfield of kinship demography and
address pressing scientific and societal questions
Please join the Harry Bridges Center on Wednesday, April 19th from 12:30 – 2 pm to discuss the role of public record requests and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in labor research and beyond. We will discuss Washington State’s Public Record Act and the FOIA, specifically what these acts allow and how they support researchers and anyone interested in accessing materials that are within the purview of the acts.
The panel will include Joyce Sinakhone, a union researcher at SEIU Healthcare 1199NW, Phil Neff, a Research Coordinator at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, and Trevor Griffey, a Labor Historian at UC Irvine, and the co-founder of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. In addition to receiving information, advice, and examples of public record requests, workshop participants will have a chance to receive support in submitting any public record request they are working on!
Required registration for zoom event: here
Please reach out to Rachel Erstad (rerstad@uw.edu), Research Coordinator of the Harry Bridges Center with any questions.
CSDE Affiliate Theresa Rocha Beardall, Hannah Curtis (Sociology, PhD), and Frank Edwards (CSDE Trainee Alum), have a fascinating new paper published in Children and Youth Services Review that quantitatively assesses American Indian and Alaskan Native children’s overexposure to the foster care system. You can read the paper HERE
Please join the Transportation Data Equity Initiative, accessibility & equity specialists, transportation planners, and GIS technologists for an exciting two-day meeting on the intersection of Interoperable Mobility Data, Pedestrian/Bike/Transit Access, and Mobility Justice.
The aim of this mini-conference is to foster a meaningful conversation among stakeholders about mobility equity and the ways in which it can be enhanced through open, multimodal, accessibility-focused transportation data.
The mini-conference also seeks to talk transparently about the hurdles to mobility equity, particularly in relation to the effects of insufficient open transportation data on transit operations, discoverability, planning, and transit users.
The Office of Population Research (OPR) at Princeton University is seeking a postdoctoral research associate, or more senior researcher to join a team of researchers working on an NIH funded project focused on developing new systems models to examine social and biological drivers of infection inequality. The overarching goal of this postdoctoral position is to advance the use of mathematical and statistical models of infectious disease transmission as tools for anticipating and addressing socioeconomic and geographic inequalities in infectious disease morbidity and mortality, with a particular focus on the impact of these factors on minoritized and marginalized groups (e.g. race/ethnic, sex/gender minority groups as well as others with stigmatized identities). This requires an individual who is methodologically and theoretically adventurous, committed to health justice, and who is excited to stake out new terrain at the intersection of social demography, infectious disease epidemiology and social epidemiology.
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth would like to invite you to a virtual event, “Getting on the GRID: Accessing and using statistics from the Global Repository of Income Dynamics,” on Wednesday, April 19, 2023, from 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EDT.
The webinar will delve into the data available at the Global Repository of Income Dynamics, a research project that assembles comparable cross-country statistics on income inequality and other income dynamics. Millions of estimates have already been released by the team, which is directed by Fatih Guvenen of the University of Minnesota, Luigi Pistaferri of Stanford University, and Gianluca Violante of Princeton University and currently composed of 51 economists working in 13 different countries.
The UW Data Collaborative (UWDC) is CSDE’s secure computing platform. The system allows us to host highly sensitive data in a highly secured Windows remote desktop environment. Users can access their data and perform processing on powerful servers using state of the art analytical software such as Stata, SAS, ArcGIS Desktop (ArcGIS Pro and ArcMap) and open-source applications including R, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, and QGIS.
The UWDC security environment was recently approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS, https://www.cms.gov/) for hosting CMS data sets. This means that researchers who require CMS data can use the UWDC without needing to develop their own data security plan—they will fall under the umbrella of the UWDC Data Management Plan Self-Attestation Questionnaire—so that they can focus on proposal study aims and data requirements in their requests for CMS data.
Additionally, we were recently notified that the University of Washington (along with other institutions of higher education) are exempt from Washington State OCIO (Office of the Chief Information Officer) Standard 141.10 (https://www.ocio.wa.gov/sites/default/files/public/policies/141.10_SecuringITAssets_201711_5.pdf) , which lays out requirements for maintaining system and network security, data integrity, and confidentiality as a precondition for obtaining and hosting certain data sets available from WA State administrative systems. This means that the UWDC can host certain data sets without requiring the extensive documentation detailed in OCIO 141.10. It should be noted that various WA State agencies are likely to require some documentation of security settings, and that this does not mean that data security is less of a concern; it simply means that there should be less red tape to deal with in requesting certain data sets from the WA State government.
The UWDC was featured in the CSDE seminar panel on March 3, 2023, “The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) an Introduction to Analysis of Innovative and Sensitive Information within a Secured Computing Environment.” Presenters included Robert Hummer (Professor of Sociology and Director of the Add Health Study), and Sydney Leigh Will (Data Dissemination & Contracts Manager for the Add Health Study), both at the University of North Carolina, Luciana Hebert (Assistant Research Professor at Washington State University), and Phil Hurvitz (UWDC Director). The panel recording is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcYlqLRx1-Q.
For more information on the UWDC, see https://dcollab.uw.edu/ or contact dcollab@uw.edu.