Archives: Affiliates

Rawan Arar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California San Diego. Her research program begins with the refugee as a central figure of analysis. Refugee displacement is the manifestation of the breakdown of borders and citizenship rights while refugee status, as a legal construct, is delimited by the principle of sovereignty. Refugees’ lives and life chances are inextricably tied to national and global policies, which create or impede access to basic needs, education, rights, and mobility. Rawan’s research lies at the intersection of these issues and pushes forward debates about states, rights, and theories of international migration.

Clayton Aldern is an advisor, data scientist, and journalist with expertise in homelessness policy, climate change, machine learning, and neuroscience. A Rhodes Scholar and Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, he holds a master’s in neuroscience and a master’s in public policy—with a focus on climate change and security—from the University of Oxford. His journalism has been published by The Atlantic, The Economist, Scientific American, Logic, and many others. From 2017 to 2019, he led the data analysis and program evaluation team for the homelessness programs at Pierce County, Washington.

Kivan Polimis’ interests include researching structural inequality, natural language processing, and developing programming solutions to social problems. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Università Bocconi’s Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy and postdoctoral affiliate at the Bocconi Institute for Data Science and Analytics (BIDSA) in Milan. Kivan has worked with Data Science for Social Good and Microsoft to develop programming solutions in transportation infrastructure and the legal system. His research focuses on combining computational social science approaches with large scale social media to evaluate population dynamics. Kivan is passionate about growing the community of computational social scientists.

April Sutton studies education, stratification, gender, and geographic inequalities. Her motivation is to enhance our understanding of the characteristics of schools and communities that produce inequality, and how and why critical life transitions shape inequality. Sutton is especially interested in scrutinizing the institutional and structural mechanisms that maintain or disrupt gender and racial/ethnic inequalities in education, work, and family formation. One of her projects includes research on rural-urban disparities in teen unintended childbearing. She uses nationally representative surveys and federal government data to pursue her research.

Natasha Rivers works at BECU as a social impact, sustainability, and data measurement professional. Natasha is developing a strategic framework around social impact by measuring BECU’s commitment to philanthropy, financial health and education, member engagement, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In her previous role as Demographer for the Seattle School District, Natasha provided data required for Facilities and Capital Levy planning. She conducted scientific research and evaluation studies to measure the impact of Seattle’s affordability crisis, including the rise of K-12 homeless youth. Natasha is civically engaged and has served on several community boards including The Seattle Children’s Theatre, 4Culture, the Urban League and Treehouse for Kids. Natasha earned her PhD in Geography (Population Demography) from UCLA where she studied black identity and contemporary sub-Saharan African migration to and within the U.S.

 

 

 

Katherine Nesse’s research is at the intersection of people and the economy. She is interested in metrics of measuring people and the economy and how those metrics are used to inform policy. Her current research project is creating a new method for estimating demographic characteristics based on the residential environment. She is particularly concerned with methods that produce data for small or sparsely populated areas. She has also researched how people cause the economy to grow, including the different roles that traditional location factors, regulatory factors, labor market and competition factors, and quality of life factors play in business location decisions.

Ryan Petros seeks to improve the lives of people with serious mental illness. As a clinical social worker, he witnessed the pervasive exclusion clients faced from the community around them, health disparities resulting in early mortality, and pathologizing from providers who had not yet adopted service delivery models reflective of the emerging focus on recovery. He obtained a doctoral degree to impact the field on a macro scale and contribute to mental health services research. His work continues to be informed by his practice experience and clinical training in motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioral therapies, and psychiatric rehabilitation. Petros’ research focuses on understanding and promoting recovery, community integration, and total health through evidence-based practices and integrated health care.

Susan Graham a trained clinical epidemiologist who has led and collaborated in numerous research projects related to HIV prevention, care, and pathogenesis since 2004, with over 120 publications in peer-reviewed journals. She is also an infectious diseases specialist with over 15 years’ experience providing HIV care and prevention services, including antiretroviral therapy (ART) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), to patients in the United States and in Kenya. Graham has experience conducting mixed methods research on HIV and mental health, contributing to community-based initiatives to improve care for vulnerable and key populations, and developing and testing interventions to improve health outcomes including ART adherence and HIV test uptake. Her research has included the development of new measures and methods, and generated new data and evidence to support population science. Graham has mentored a number of clinician scientists and trainees in the fields of epidemiology, global health, and psychology.

Dr. Jody Early is a Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies and affiliate faculty in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. A social scientist and a Master Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES), Jody’s research, teaching and praxis largely explore social ecological factors that impact the health and well-being of individuals and populations, especially within communities of color. Her research foci can be categorized into three primary areas of inquiry which include: 1) examining bio-psycho-social and ecological factors that impact individual and population health; 2) working with communities to develop, implement, and evaluate culturally tailored health promotion programs and services; and 3) exploring technologies and digital strategies that enhance critical pedagogy in health promotion and in higher education.

Over the last two decades, Jody has dedicated her energy and passion to improving health equity and education. Her work, both in and outside of the academy, has allowed her to collaborate with communities to design, implement, and evaluate, culturally tailored health education interventions and strategies. Her research and practice have also enabled her to spend years working with lay community health workers and promoters, and exploring health promotion models that include community engaged approaches relating to such health issues as: breast and cervical cancer; diabetes, and HIV.

Due to Annie T. Chen’s multidisciplinary background, she integrates methods and approaches from multiple fields in her research, leveraging text mining, visualization, and statistical techniques to better understand people’s behavior and experience. One key area of research expertise is text and visual analytics, particularly in the extraction and visualization of concepts relating to behavior, social and psychological processes, and contexts (e.g. social, environmental). These types of concepts are different in nature than those that are typically extracted (e.g. medications, side effects, and diagnoses) in natural language processing of biomedical texts, and thus require the use of text mining and visualization techniques that are suited to related types of source data and constructs. She has developed systems that display text in novel ways to facilitate pattern discovery, and interactive visualizations based on social media and the rich set of data that we collect from digital interventions, to provide insight about user experience and behavior.

Other than Chen’s methodological interest in data mining and visualization methods for the discovery of behavioral, social, and psychological processes and contexts in text, she is interested in how people’s understanding of a subject forms, and how this changes over time. Most of the subjects that she speaks of are primarily from the health domain, such as “health”, “illness”, “well-being”, though she is also interested in examples from history. Knowledge formation, representation, and diffusion is a process that has tremendous impacts on our lives, over vast spaces and geographical boundaries. She hopes that her research can contribute to improvements in our endeavors as a society to empower people with knowledge that they can use to better their lives.