CSDE Affiliate Chiyoung Lee recently published two papers that employed network analyses to explain health outcomes. The first paper, “Network Analysis of Adverse Childhood Experiences and Cardiovascular Diseases“, was published in SSM-Population Health. It demonstrates how network analysis, a statistical method that estimates complex patterns of associations between variables, can be used to model adverse childhood experiences and cardiovascular diseases. In the second paper,”Racial Differences in C-reactive Protein, Depression Symptoms, and Social Relationships in Older Adults: A Moderated Network Analysis.”, published in Biological Research For Nursing, Lee introduces moderated network analysis as an integrative approach to assess the moderation effects of race on the relationship between C-reactive protein and depression symptoms in older adults.
CSDE Affiliate Karina Walters has been selected to direct the Tribal Health Research Office at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In this role, Dr. Walters will oversee Indigenous health research funded by the NIH across the nation. This is a huge recognition of Dr. Walters’ outstanding efforts to grow research capacities amongst indigenous communities and to conduct excellent research about indigenous health and well being.
CSDE Director Sara Curran was recently quoted in a Seattle Times article concerning the proposed minimum race and ethnic categories being considered for adoption by the US federal government. Curran notes how the gathering of race and ethnic data about the US population has been a feature of the US Census and other federal data collection efforts since the founding of the country. Furthermore, those minimum set of categories have also evolved over the decades, as the composition of the US population shifts and meaningfully new and different identities emerge among US residents. Notably, in recent decades the category of Some Other Race (SOR) has been selected by a growing proportion of US residents. Recent research indicates that the SOR identity selection comprises an extremely heterogenous population and its growth is a reflection of how the current minimum set of categories does not fully capture the meaningfully diverse identities of the US population.
There is a month left in providing public comments on these proposed changes. The initial proposals can be found on the January 27 Federal Register Notice, Initial Proposals For Updating OMB’s Race and Ethnicity Statistical Standards, which closes on April 12, 2023. These are important opportunities for all of us to bring our best social science insights to the OMB’s deliberation!
We published this story several weeks ago and failed to acknowledge the lead author of the article (and CSDE alum) – James Buszkiewicz. Here is the corrected story.
In a productive collaboration, CSDE alum James Buszkiewicz along with CSDE Affiliates Heather Hill, Jennifer Otten, and Anjum Hajat and CSDE Trainee Andrew Drewnowski recently published their article “Racial, ethnic, and gender differences in the association between higher state minimum wages and health and mental well-being in US adults with low educational attainment” in Social Science & Medicine. This paper utilizes a triple difference-in-difference strategy to evaluate the associations between minimum wage and obesity, hypertension, fair or poor general health, and moderate psychological distress in 25-64 year old adults with a high school education/GED or less.
1-on-1 Meetings are available with Professor Torche: Signup Here
Join us for a talk by Dr. Florencia Torche (Stanford) about “The Effect of COVID Infection on Infant Health: Trends over the Course of the Pandemic.” Please make special note that this talk is in Parrington Hall room 220. Dr. Torche is Dunlevie Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Her research and writing focus on social inequality and social mobility, educational disparities, and marriage and family dynamics. Her recent scholarship has extensively studied the influence of early-life exposures and circumstances –starting before birth– on individual health, development, and wellbeing using natural experiments and causal inference approaches
Virtually join UC Berkeley colleagues for a talk by Dr. Anqi Liu (UC Berkeley) for a seminar entitled “A Conservative Extrapolation Approach to Trustworthy AI”.
Dr. Anqi Liu
Asst. Professor of Computer Science
Friday, March 31st, 12:00–1:15 PM
3505 N. Charles Street
— http://zoom.us/j/6019060976
Abstract:
The unprecedented prediction accuracy of modern machine learning beckons for application in a wide range of real-world situations, including healthcare, education, and hiring. A key challenge is the difficulty to collect data from diverse enough populations. It causes a well-known problem called distribution shift, which means the test cases are not well-represented by the training data and usually leads to inequivalent performance in different subgroups. Overconfident errors in the under-represented group brings harm to social trust in AI-based services. In these cases, we must go beyond the conventional learning paradigm of maximizing average prediction accuracy with generalization guarantees that rely on strong distributional relationships between training and test examples. In this talk, I will describe a distributionally robust learning framework that offers rigorous guarantees under data distribution shift. This framework yields appropriately conservative extrapolations and can be used for producing more equitable prediction results among subgroups. I will also introduce a survey of other real-world applications that would benefit from this framework for future work.
A position is available for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the lab of Dr. Daphne Hernandez to study food insecurity. The position offers an opportunity to work on a NIH-funded project with the end goal of creating a culturally appropriate food insecurity scale for Spanish-speaking immigrant parents that have low or limited English proficiency. The Fellow is expected to have studied food insecurity and engaged in qualitative research during graduate school (cognitive interviewing preferred), in addition to having experienced working in resource limited communities with low-income Hispanic families where parents speak primarily Spanish.
The Fellow will also have the opportunity to published from two other community-based projects that focused on food insecurity that used quantitative and qualitative methods. In addition, there will be other publication opportunities based on existing secondary data sets as lead author and co-author. The Fellow will further their research and training agenda through formal mentorship and professional development activities, such as presenting at local and national conferences and participating in seminars through the CSON Postdoctoral Training Program. Twenty percent time can be allocated to publishing dissertation papers. The opportunity to mentor undergraduate students on research projects (implementation of projects, development of posters and manuscripts) is also available.
U.C. Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project (UDP – urbandisplacement.org) and Eviction Research Network (ERN – evictionresearch.net) at the Institute of Governmental Studies, Berkeley Institute of Data Science (BIDS), and the Department of Sociology has an opening for a 2-year post-doctoral position beginning June 2023 on evaluating eviction outcomes during the pandemic and teaching computational social science. The successful candidate will be appointed part-time as a postdoc, with approximately two-thirds time devoted to research over the course of two-years, and part-time as a lecturer.
The eviction project is a HUD funded grant that investigates how the U.S. Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) impacted eviction outcomes using a novel longitudinal eviction database. This project will create one of the first longitudinal eviction databases using large public and private datasets, linking records across multiple datasets with personal identifiable information, and utilizing Bayesian and machine learning models to predict neighborhood and household drivers and outcomes of eviction. The purpose of this research is to identify the racial and gender disparities in eviction, displacement, and economic gaps that perpetuate unequal outcomes for different groups and inform policy. The candidate will co-author publications with the PI and team as well as be able to use this database for future research. The remaining candidate time will be devoted to teaching computational social science to graduate students in the social sciences and related fields in a two-semester course sequence that covers reproducibility and transparency, applied machine learning, natural language processing, and causal inference within the Department of Sociology.
The candidate will be part of the Sociology, Urban Planning, and BIDS community, working closely with Dr. Tim Thomas (UDP) and Professor David Harding (Sociology), and will play a vital role in training students in the growing field of computational social science. The team will publish evidence-based research in academic journals and use these findings to directly inform national, state, and local government agencies on how to reduce eviction and housing inequity.
PDB supports research, data collection, and training in demography, behavioral and social science research on reproductive health, and population health.
PDB seeks a program officer with expertise in demography, the social determinants of health, the development and maintenance of longitudinal cohorts, and the collection and analysis of population representative samples. The incumbent will develop a portfolio of interdisciplinary science that supports research, training, and career development in sociology and economics as they relate to health, development, and productivity. The ideal candidate will have significant research experience in causal inference, interactions between macro- and micro-levels of analysis, and the impacts of policies and institutional structures.
This is an exciting time to join NICHD as we implement our strategic plan to guide and advance research in the near- and long-term future. Through this implementation, the successful candidate will be able to shape scientific research opportunities that will directly affect the field, biomedical science, and public health for years to come.
The Associate Dean for Equity, Justice, and Inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences is seeking to secure the services of a Research Assistant for Spring and Summer quarters to help with the planning, implementation, and analysis of a DEI climate survey as well as putting together a central DEI repository. The proposed .5 FTE appointment is for the entire UW Summer Quarter and Fall Quarters. All salary and benefits will be consistent with the current UAW 4121 Collective Bargaining Agreement.
This is an exciting opportunity to work in cutting-edge research focused on matters of DEI. The result of this work will be the establishment of a series of benchmarks from which the College of Arts and Sciences will be able to evaluate its progress in achieving DEI goals that further the mission of the College.