Archives: Affiliates

Anirban Basu is a health economist and a methodologist, who specializes in decision-making, heterogeneity, and evaluations in health care. He is the Stergachis Family Endowed Professor and Director of The Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle. He also holds joint and adjunct appointments in the Departments of Health Services and Economics, and is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has taught courses on decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis and advanced methods in comparative effectiveness research. He also directs the Program on Health Economics and Outcomes Methodology (PHEnOM) at the University of Washington.

Steve Mooney’s core expertise is in developing and analyzing contextual influences on health. As a part of his National Library of Medicine funded K99/R00 project, he is currently developing software to automatically compile measures of neighborhood context for any location in the United States. He has analyzed such contextual variables in relation to health behaviors such as walking and outcomes such as cardiac arrest, and has developed the Neighborhood-Environment Wide Association Study (NE-WAS) design to bring agnostic data-driven approaches to this research domain. He has also worked extensively with GPS device data, during his doctoral career, as part of his K99/R00 project, and as part of a recently launched National Highway Transport Safety Administration project.

Deborah Nadal is a cultural and medical anthropologist specialized in South Asia, with extensive fieldwork experience in Jharkhand, Odisha, Rajasthan and Delhi. Combining her childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian with her academic education as a social scientist, she is currently interested in how people and animals live alongside each other. Her research spans from monkey hunting in foraging societies to dog keeping in the urban setting, with particular attention to disease sharing and transmission across species.

Currently she is working on a 3-year post-doctoral project on dog-mediated rabies in rural Gujarat and Maharashtra, India, that draws from medical anthropology, epidemiology and Indology to investigate the social, cultural and religious determinants of this complex public health issue. This project is funded by the European Commission through a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Global Fellowship. Deborah is affiliated with the Center for One Health Research (University of Washington) directed by Prof. Peter Rabinowitz and with the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine (College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow) where she works under the mentorship of Prof. Sarah Cleaveland.

Deborah holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Verona (Italy) (2014), a M.A. in Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology and Ethnolinguistics from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) (2009) and a B.A. in Languages, Cultures and Institutions of Eurasian and Mediterranean Countries (Languages: Hindi and Urdu) again from Ca’ Foscari (2007).

She has recently published her first book, “Rabies in the Streets. Interspecies Camaraderie in Urban India” (Penn State University Press, 2020), funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, New York, which is one of the major international funding sources for anthropological research.

Among her other publications: “To kill or not to kill? Negotiating life, death, and One Health in the context of dog-mediated rabies control in colonial and independent India”, in Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains, edited by C. Lynteris, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2019: 91-117; “Pregnant with puppies. The fear of rabies in the slums of New Delhi, India”, Medicine Anthropology Theory 5(3), 2018: 130-156; “The real life of holy cows. How photography has turned cows from sacred icons into mundane animals”, Antennae 40, 2017: 67-76; “Kamadhenu. L’aspetto più materno della Devi nell’Induismo contemporaneo” [Kamadhenu. The most maternal aspect of Devi in contemporary Hinduism], in Motherhood(s) and Polytheisms, edited by G. Pedrucci, C. Terranova and F. Pache Guignard, Patron, Bologna, 2017: 371-382; “Cows caught in the crossfire. Provisional remarks on India’s current cow slaughter debate”, Religions of South Asia 10(1), 2016: 83-106; “Housing ancestors. The reorganization of living spaces among the Birhor of Jharkhand and Odisha”, International Quarterly for Asian Studies, special issue Contemporary Indigeneity in India 46(1-2), 2015: 39-58; “Hunting monkeys and gathering identities: Exploring self-representation among the Birhor of Central-East India”, La Ricerca Folklorica 69, 2014: 263-278

Raphael Mondesir spent three years as an adjunct instructor at SPU before joining the Sociology Department as a full-time faculty member in the fall of 2017. He earned both his master’s and doctorate in sociology at the University of Washington. Before moving to Seattle for his graduate studies, Dr. Mondesir lived in Massachusetts where he earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at Salem State University.

His research agenda stands at the crossroads of economic sociology, the sociology of religion, global development studies, and political sociology. Dr. Mondesir is currently investigating how civic participation affects rural development in the absence of a central state and the role of religion in the structuration of civic networks. He also takes a particular interest in the role that NGOs and other organizations play in the aid channels that sustain global development.

Much like his research, Dr. Mondesir’s teaching reflects a passion for debates about inequality, development processes, and the integration of marginalized groups. His lectures often focus on how the poor and downtrodden make decisions and express their agency under the weight of both visible and invisible power structures that are at play in their environment. One of his primary pedagogical goals is to gently challenge his students to confront their misconceptions about social inequality, discrimination, and privilege.

I am a health services researcher focused on quality and costs of care for medically complex patients. I am particularly interested in understanding how features of the health care delivery system and payment policies affect the quality and efficiency of care received by older adults with multimorbidity, with dementia, and people at the end of life.

Tracy Mroz, PhD, OTR/L is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, School of Medicine at the University of Washington. Dr. Mroz is a health services researcher with a clinical background in occupational therapy. Her research focuses on the impact of health policy and delivery system factors on access to and quality of post-acute care services for older adults and adults with disabilities, with an emphasis on home health care and care provided in rural communities. Her primary research approach is secondary analysis of large data sets, including Medicare administrative data, survey data, and community-level data. As an investigator with the WWAMI Rural Health Research Center and the UW Center for Health Workforce Studies, she is leading studies on post-acute care in rural communities and therapy workforce.

Dr. Fishman is a health care economist with expertise in designing and conducting analyses of health service use and cost and the organization of health care systems with a specific emphasis on primary care. Dr. Fishman is also an expert on the organization and management of large databases for use in health services research. As part of a comprehensive research program on costs and outcomes associated with different clinical and behavioral health states and conditions, Dr. Fishman has examined the cost implications of a variety of modifiable health behaviors and addictive disorders including alcohol abuse and chemical dependency, tobacco use, over-weight and obesity, as well as behavioral health issues including depression and anxiety disorders. This research has allowed Dr. Fishman to gain expertise in the analysis of health care use and cost data related to the examination of how health behaviors impact heath service use and health care outcomes, as well as the empirical  methods best suited to assess health service use and cost over time as well as at any point in time.

Sarah Stone is Executive Director of the University of Washington’s eScience Institute and a Deputy Director for the West Big Data Innovation Hub (WBDIH). Stone has a passion for fostering education and research collaborations across disciplines. She co-leads the UW Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program and is involved in thematic development for the WBDIH Metro Data Science working group. In her role as eScience Director of Data Science Education, she co-chairs the Education and Career Paths Special Interest Group and helps departments across campus develop data science specializations. Stone handles eScience operations and planning, serving as a primary contact for university and industry partners, funding agencies and the public. Prior to joining eScience, Stone was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Oceanography at Humboldt State University in northern California. She has been involved in several large, interdisciplinary research projects in oceanography and has a specialty in zooplankton ecology.

Anissa Tanweer is a research scientist at the eScience Institute focused on human-centered data science. Her work incorporates a range of qualitative methods for studying the practice and culture of data-intensive computational work, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation.

She is passionate about sociotechnical thinking, collaborating with data science teams, and leveraging action research to foster reflexive, ethical data science practices. In particular, she engages with efforts to harness data for societal benefit, and has both studied and helped develop the eScience Institute’s annual Data Science for Social Good program.

Jose is a Data Scientist at the University of Washington’s eScience Institute. Jose’s interests include the application of data science methods on sociological and educational data and building data tools to facilitate that process. Jose’s research combines theory and practice with data science methods to inform education policymaking. Previously he was a data scientist with the Center for Education Results, a local non-profit, where he leveraged statistical and machine learning methods to explore education data and where he now serves as Data Science Senior Fellow. Jose earned his doctorate at the UW, with a focus in statistics and measurement and a Master of Education in policy, also from UW. His doctoral research focused on assessing causal inference methodology in the absence of randomization on complex data structures.