Archives: Affiliates

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.

Gundula Proksch is a scholar, registered architect and Associate Professor of Architecture and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington. In her research, professional work and teaching she explores interdisciplinary practices in the built environment, novel approaches in sustainable design, and their potential to positively shape the futures of cities.

I am the Genentech Distinguished Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, working under the mentoring of Jerry Reiter. I completed my PhD in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, where my advisor was Steve Fienberg. My undergraduate studies are from the National University of Colombia, in Bogota, where I majored in statistics.

In my research I develop methodology for a variety of applied and data-driven problems. Thus far I have worked on:

1. Record linkage techniques to combine datafiles that contain information on overlapping sets of individuals but lack unique identifiers.

Nonignorable missing data modeling, and the usage of auxiliary information to identify nonignorable missing data mechanisms.

Classification techniques that output sets of plausible labels for ambiguous sample points.

I also have experience working with social network models for valued ties, and capture-recapture models in the context of human rights violations.

Dr. Park studies early childhood development and parenting in the context of culture, immigration, and public policy. In particular, she is concerned with systematically improving educational equity at all levels of early childhood education across both institutional and informal contexts of development. She seeks to understand how learning and development unfold across socioeconomically and culturally diverse ecologies and help create policies that humanize and reimagine early learning environments that reflect the hopes and priorities of historically underserved, non-dominant families and communities.

Dr. Park directs the Early childhood development, Parenting, Immigration, and Culture (EPIC) lab that integrates perspectives across education, developmental science, and public policy in pursuing three interconnected lines of research:

• Evaluating and improving early childhood system, policy, and program
• Supporting racialized Dual Language Learners (DLLs) and immigrant-origin children
• Understanding parenting and family context of early childhood development (ECD)

James Young is the Director of the WCRER at the University of Washington. James has over 25 years of experience in analyzing property markets worldwide both as a consultant and as an academic with a particular emphasis on market analysis, urban economics, and housing. He has published in leading academic journals including Real Estate Economics, Urban Studies, Housing Studies, Journal of Housing Economics, and the Journal of Real Estate Research.

Jamaica Corker is a Program Officer for Data & Evaluation in the Family Planning Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A demographer with broad experience in international population dynamics research, her research has focused on fertility and family planning in sub-Saharan Africa, migration and urbanization, and linking demography and geographic information systems (GIS). She has since worked extensively in health and family planning program implementation in sub-Saharan Africa, including several years in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Population Services International (PSI) and as part of the West African Ebola response in 2014-15. She holds a Master’s degree in Population and Development from the London School of Economics and PhD in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania.

I am a sociologist interested in how economic and cultural transformations shape gender and intimate relationships in families. My award-winning book, Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia (Cornell, 2015), analyzes how ordinary people, especially single mothers, navigate the transition from state socialism to market capitalism during Russia’s “quiet revolution” in family life. Through in-depth analysis of Russia’s matrifocal families, I challenge several assumptions underlying theories of family life, poverty, and gender. Related to my interest in single-mother families, I have written about nonresident fathers and divorce, the effects of work insecurities and neoliberal capitalism on the self, intergenerational relations between grandmothers and adult children, the intersectionality of gender and age, and the ways in which unpaid care work shapes gender inequality.

My current research examines how “intensive grandmothering” in the United States affects the transition to parenthood, parents’ responses to the child-care crisis, and broader inequalities among families.

Alison Drake, MPH, PhD is an epidemiologist and Associate Professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Global Health. She received her MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan and PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Washington. She is currently an Assistant Director of the Global Center for Integrated Health of Women, Adolescent, and Children (Global WACh), co-Director of the Family Planning Decision Support Scientific Priority Area for Global WACh, and an Associate Director for the eHealth Scientific Working Group at the University of Washington/Fred Hutch Center for AIDS Research. Dr. Drake’s research interests include HIV prevention among women and adolescents, incident maternal HIV infections, mother-to-child HIV transmission, adolescent reproductive health, family planning, and mHealth. She is the principal investigator for a K01 award to optimize HIV retesting for prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission in Kenya.  Dr. Drake is also a collaborator on Mobile WAChx, a randomized clinical trial that will evaluate short message service (SMS) interventions to improve maternal antiretroviral adherence in Kenya. In addition, she is a co-instructor for two courses in the School of Public Health, Responsible Conduct of Research: Global to Local and Global Perspectives on Reproductive Health.