Archives: Affiliates

My research focuses on the socioeconomic mobility and assimilation of immigrants throughout history. I am generally interested in how processes of mobility and labor market outcomes of immigrants are interlinked with societal institutions and economic structures that may condition individual efforts to make it in America. Currently, I am taking advantage of the advent of digitized historical data of US censuses, passenger records, and company personnel files to explore mobility trends of immigrants who entered the US between 1880 and 1924. These data sets allow me to recreate the immigrant experience over the life course, following individuals from the passenger list to US censuses and then tracking them and their families through subsequent censuses over time. By having longitudinal data of individuals, the first of their kind in sociology, I am able to identify the specific mechanisms that helped or hindered economic mobility in the first half of the twentieth century both within and across generations.

Dr. Jones-Smith is an associate professor in the departments of Health Systems and Population Health and Epidemiology and a core faculty member of the Nutrition Sciences Program. She is an epidemiologist, health policy researcher, and population heath scientist with expertise in social and structural determinants of weight-related health. Specifically, her research focuses on investigating upstream drivers of nutrition-related health inequities and follows three main lines: 1) Identifying the Health Impacts of Policies that Address Social and Structural Determinants; 2) Rigorous Evaluation of Nutrition Policies Aimed at Improving Dietary Intake and Population Health; 3) Identifying the role of economic and community resources, including food environments, in weight-related health.

Her research is interdisciplinary and is focused on obtaining actionable results to address upstream social factors, contexts, and policies that influence population health. Her research has been funded by diverse sources including the National Institutes of Health, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the City of Seattle.

 

Related to the work of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, Dr. Jones-Smith is a population health scientist and has repeatedly received support from the Population Dynamics Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for her research, including a fully funded 2-year traineeship with the Carolina Population Center as a doctoral student, a K99/R00 Early Independence Career Award, and most recently an NIH R01 award.

 

Dr. Jones-Smith has a Masters of Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley, a doctorate in Nutrition Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and post-doctoral training in health inequities and causal inference.

My primary interests include community sustainable design and development in an international context; urban design and planning history and theory with an emphasis on social and environmental factors; and qualitative and quantitative research methods for evaluating the efficacy of urban form, including challenges of cross-cultural research. Specifically, I focus on the history and contemporary conditions of urbanism and development in the Americas, with an emphasis on public space and the public realm. In particular, I examine the narrative roles that built landscapes play in: politics and society, ecology, and human health and well-being. Thus, first, my work on pedagogical urbanism in Latin America and the United States examines the use of public space to front city regeneration projects. Second, my work on visible ecology critiques and directs the development of eco-literacy in community design and development practices. Finally, my work on human health and well-being is currently being developed through my Mobile Cities project centered on public space investment and community mobility planning in metro transit station projects. These themes are linked by a focus on understanding, reading, critiquing, and modifying narratives in the built environment. Of particular interest to me is the concept of legibility, or comprehensibility, and whether legible environments are capable of shaping sustainable urban places, practices, and policies.

Maria Bleil, PhD, is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing. She is an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and a recent recipient of the Charles and Gerda Spence Endowed Professorship.

Dr. Bleil’s research focuses on early life adversity and its influence on developmental pathways that affect life course health and contribute to health disparities. Her work holds significant implications for identifying intervention areas to better manage risk in early life, particularly in promoting reproductive and cardiometabolic health.

Currently, Dr. Bleil leads a 30-year follow-up study of the landmark NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), in which children and their families were intensively studied from birth through adolescence. The SECCYD follow-up study has successfully located these now-adult participants, who are in their late 20s, to collect extensive social, behavioral, and health data. This data enables testing of the effects of early life adversity and the mechanisms behind these effects (e.g., pubertal timing) on long-term health and disease risk trajectories.

Additionally, Dr. Bleil leads a follow-up study of a recently completed randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess whether the benefits of an attachment-focused intervention, Promoting First Relationships®, extend to the child’s cardiometabolic health.

She is also a co-investigator on a study examining reproductive aging trajectories, focusing on how individual- and neighborhood-level exposures influence the acceleration of reproductive aging, the timing of menopause, and post-menopausal health.

Jacqueline is a User Researcher in the Experiences and Devices Management organization at Microsoft in Redmond. In her current role, she uses a mixed methods research approach in her work with design and engineering teams to understand the needs of enterprise customers who use Microsoft products.

I am a trained behavioral scientist and have had an active career in applied research. My interests span a wide range of social and behavioral topics including gender and social change programming, participatory governance approaches, and quality improvement strategies on improving reproductive and maternal health outcomes. I have also supported innovation and implementation of programs to improve effectiveness of frontline workers, to increase use of data for decision-making, and to build capacity of government and partners to provide family planning (including long-acting methods) for adolescents and for women and girls in fragile and crisis-affected settings.

Marlaine Figueroa Gray, PhD, is a medical anthropologist with a passion for eliciting illness narratives and health care experiences from patients, family members and medical professionals. She has researched how the intersection of creative practices and medical care provide insight into understanding the logic of biomedical care, what counts as evidence that a creative activity “works,” and how arts activities can serve as a model of how to provide better, more patient-and-family centered care. She is particularly interested in how we attend to patient suffering, and in what types of care are possible when there are no medical treatments available.

Dr. Hough has an earned doctorate in sociology with concentrations in demography and social statistics. He has accumulated over 30 years of knowledge accessing and analyzing federal and local statistical systems, and over 20 years of experience turning data into information addressing state, local and tribal government research needs. He served as the Coordinator of the State Data Center programs for both Washington and Oregon states from 1993‐2005, acting as the lead contact with the US Census Bureau for dissemination, training and analysis of Department of Commerce data products.

He also served as director of the Population Research Center (PRC) at Portland State University (PSU) from 2006-2009. As PRC director he had ultimate responsibility for the credibility of the annual, official Oregon population estimates for the state, counties and cities.  He helped refine many of the data inputs and methodology used to produce these official estimates.

Over the past twenty years, his academic research has focused on evaluating and improving the data produced from the Census Bureau’s redesign for Census 2010, the American Community Survey (ACS). He has provided training to local and national data experts as well as students, made presentations to national public data user groups on ACS data quality and usefulness, and with David Swanson has presented findings at professional meetings and co-authored a handful of refereed journal articles. The crowning achievement of this research led to an invitation to provide expert testimony to the National Academy of Sciences on state and local government data needs related to the ACS.

Dr. Hough’s current research is focused on State Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) and their applications to applied demography. In his current position as Senior Education Research Analyst for the Education Research & Data Center for Washington State, Dr. Hough researches administrative records linking high school students to postsecondary attendance, achievement and labor force participation.