On Wednesday 2/19 from 9-10 AM, CDWG will host Dr. Kivan Polimis for a research talk. Kivan Polimis is a Data Scientist at Karna and a lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Washington. Dr. Polimis is a computational demographer specializing in the use of non-traditional data such as social media to analyze population dynamics, with a focus on migration patterns. Dr. Polimis’ research leverages statistical frameworks that fuse novel and traditional demographic data to explore how digital interactions reflect demographic trends. The presentation will be entitled “Restoring Trust in Scholarly Research: Using Data-Driven Analysis of Retractions to Enhance Transparency and Accountability.”
Eroding trust in institutions across fields such as academia, journalism, public health, and government poses a significant threat to personal well-being and the integrity of knowledge production. While academia already relies on evaluations like peer-reviewed research, it can further enhance accountability by adopting tools that promote greater researcher accountability. For example, implementing tools to identify articles likely to be retracted due to critical errors or misconduct would help restore public trust in scholarly work. This project integrates data from multiple scholarly databases, including withdrarXiv, Scopus, and Google Citations, to track and analyze metrics of retracted academic articles. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques, the project aims to predict features of withdrawn articles, such as patterns in author behavior, publication fields, and citation dynamics. Additionally, an investigation into how problematic research spreads within academic communities by analyzing publication networks, author movement, and citation relationships is ongoing. The findings presented here are preliminary.
When: Friday, Feb 21, 2025 (12:30-1:30PM)
Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here)
1-on-1 meetings: 223 Raitt Hall (sign up here)
We are looking forward to hosting Brea Perry from Indiana University on Friday, Feb. 21 in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. In addition, there are opportunities to meet 1-1 with Dr. Perry throughout the day. Sign up here!
Research suggests social connectedness reduces dementia risk and helps older adults with neuropathology maintain cognitive functionality and quality of life. However, little is known about the specific underlying social and biological mechanisms. This presentation provides an overview of potential pathways through social bridging (i.e., cognitive enrichment through expansive social networks) and social bonding (i.e., neuroendocrine benefits of integration in cohesive social networks). Results from a cohort study of older adults that combines social network methodology with data on general and social cognitive function and neuroimaging biomarkers are presented. These findings provide insight into specific etiological mechanisms and have important implications for cognitive health disparities that can be leveraged to inform policies and programs that support brain health and cognitive function in older adults.
Dr. Brea Perry is the Allen D. and Polly S. Grimshaw Professor in the Department of Sociology, Associate Director of the Irsay Institute for Sociomedical Sciences Research, and the Vice Provost and Associate Vice President for Research at Indiana University. Her research investigates the intersecting influence of social networks, biomarkers, social psychology, and social inequality in health and illness. Brea’s work often focuses on psychological and brain diseases, including neurological disorders common in aging, mental illness, and substance use disorders. Brea has received over $19M in funding from multiple National Institutes of Health, including NIA, NIDA, NIDCR, and NCRR, as well as the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and other charitable foundations. She has served as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Medical Sociology, Series Editor of Advances in Medical Sociology, and Associate Editor of Alzheimer’s & Dementia. She was elected to the Sociological Research Association in 2021 and was a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholar from 2019-2022.
CSDE is pleased to introduce two of our new External Research Affiliates! Michele Cadigan, (Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Arizona State University) utilizes mixed methodologies to examine intersectional inequality at the intersection of the criminal legal system and economic markets, with a primary focus on cannabis legalization and a secondary focus on monetary sanctions. Salene Jones (Associate Professor, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center) is a psychologist whose research focuses on cancer care delivery, the patient experience and quality of life. She is particularly interested in psychometrics, which is the development of valid and reliable questionnaires for patient-reported outcomes to assess pain, depression, anxiety and other facets of quality of life. Learn more about each affiliate in the full story!
Michele Cadigan – Dr. Michele Cadigan’s work utilizes mixed methodologies to examine intersectional inequality at the intersection of the criminal legal system and economic markets, with a primary focus on cannabis legalization and a secondary focus on monetary sanctions. Specifically, she explores how laws and practices in economic markets and the criminal legal system intersect to construct racial meaning and shape inequality at both macro- and meso-levels. Her work has been published in The Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Russell Sage Foundation: RSF Journal for the Social Sciences, and the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. Additionally, her work has been supported by national funding organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy Research.
Salene Jones – Dr. Salene Jones is a psychologist whose research focuses on cancer care delivery, the patient experience and quality of life. She is particularly interested in psychometrics, which is the development of valid and reliable questionnaires for patient-reported outcomes to assess pain, depression, anxiety and other facets of quality of life. A member of the health economics group, the Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research, Dr. Jones also examines the association of financial worry and anxiety with outcomes in people with cancer. Her research includes studies of the relationship of health anxiety and fear of cancer to health care use and cancer prevention.
On Wednesday February 19th at 12:30pm, CSDE Abraham Flaxman (Dept. of Health Metrics Sciences) will give a seminar titled “When AI Outlistens Experts: Large Language Models as Tools for Verbal Autopsy Analysis.”
Verbal autopsy (VA) serves as a crucial tool for understanding causes of death in regions lacking comprehensive vital registration systems. However, current methods for analyzing VA data face significant limitations: physician review is resource-intensive and potentially biased, while existing computational approaches struggle with the complexity of death classification. This talk presents preliminary results from using large language models (LLMs) to interpret VA interviews and predict causes of pregnancy-related deaths. We evaluated ChatGPT-4 and Claude.ai across different prompting strategies and found that LLM-based classification achieves performance superior to physicians. I will discuss some implications of this, as well as methodological trade-offs, and future directions for this line of research.
LOCATION:
409 Savery Hall
Zoom Link: https://washington.zoom.us/j/91889204671
Dial In: +1 206 337 9723 (US)
One tap mobile: +12063379723,,91889204671# (US)
Meeting ID: 918 8920 4671
In collaboration with six global partners, Methods4All recently announced the launch of a Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP) International Curriculum & Community of Practice. Spanning 15 methods modules, there are 50 free YouTube methods lectures that offer the best methodological guidance our nationally-selected Distinguished Teaching Faculty has to offer. All lectures are available in English and captioned in 9 languages. Learn more here.
Hypertension has been identified as a leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States, and one that disproportionately impacts Black mothers. In a recent paper that was awarded the Charles E. Gibbs Leadership Prize for the best paper published in Women’s Health Issues in 2024, CSDE Affiliates Monica Keith (Vanderbilt University) and Melanie Martin (Anthropology) demonstrate the impacts of social environments on hypertensive risk as measured by allostatic load among pregnant women. Study findings show that measures of social environments such as household income and partnered status were stronger predictors of hypertensive risk than behavioral factors, with strongest effects observed for Black women. Read the full study here.
CSDE Affiliates Sara Curran and Emmanuela Gakidou with CSDE Scientist June Yang are part of a large multi-institutional team awarded an NIA P60 grant for the virtual Center on Aging, Climate, and Health (CACHE). The initiative is led by the University of Colorado (Hunter, PI) and the City University of New York (Balk, PI) and is joined by the University of Minnesota (Grace, PI), and El Collegio de Mexico (Sanchez, PI). The virtual center facilitates research and fosters collaboration among a wide-range of researchers working at the nexus of aging, health and climate change through targeted interdisciplinary training, information sharing, and investments in research support. Learn more about CACHE here.
Although many governments commonly issue emergency evacuation notices in response to environmental disasters, researchers have not developed measures to systematically evaluate and compare the population burdens of these notices. In a recent research brief in Population Research and Policy Review, CSDE External Affiliate Ethan Raker and co-author Xueqing Zhang introduce the concept of measurement in “person-days” under an emergency order. Person-time measures of emergency orders reveal the population burden of environmental hazards, can be applied broadly to cases like air quality alerts or heat warnings, and help demographers study environmental impacts across locations. Read the full brief here.