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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

CACHE Webinar: Housing Data for Aging Research (04/02/26)

CACHE Webinar on Housing Data for Aging Research on April 2, at 11 a.m. PT/12 p.m MT/2 p.m. ET

Speaker: Alex Mikulas, University of Colorado Boulder and CACHE Postdoctoral Associate

Dr. Alex Mikulas will provide a framework for considering how housing shapes environment and weather risk, exposure severity, and resiliency for older adults. He will review several housing-related data sources, how they may supplement research on the health impacts of the environment, and the challenges associated with housing data. These data sources include housing market data, public census data products, and federal public health datasets with unique housing variables. 

IUSSP Debate: When Populations Shrink, Should States Encourage Births or Adapt? (04/01/26)

Join the IUSSP online (Zoom), on Wednesday, April 1, 2026 11:00–12:30 Universal Time for a high-level virtual debate tackling one of the most consequential policy questions of the 21st century: Should nations with more deaths than births implement or increase incentives for childbearing and subsidies for child-rearing?

With opening insights on the question from Tomas Sobotka of the Vienna Institute of Demography, we bring together four world experts to debate:

  • YES Team: Anna Rotkirch (Finland) & Reiko Hayashi (Japan)
  • NO Team: Youngtae Cho (South Korea) & Vegard Skirbekk (Norway)

What does a society look like when natural population growth is no longer the default? Can financial subsidies truly compete with the powerful structural and cultural forces of the 21st century? Are there other options? Is human population decline a good thing so habitats of other species can expand instead of continuing to shrink? This debate brings together world experts to address the ultimate question: Is population decline a policy failure to be fixed, or a new reality to be managed? Come prepared to have your assumptions challenged and to pose questions of the speakers as we consider options for countries with declining populations.

The Debaters:

On the “Yes” side: 

  • Anna Rotkirch, Research professor, Population Research Institute, Väestöliitto (Finland)
  • Reiko Hayashi, Director-General, National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (Japan)

On the “No” side: 

  • Youngtae Cho, Professor, School of Public Health, Seoul National University (South Korea)
  • Vegard Skirbekk, Professor, Center for Fertility and Health, University of Oslo (Norway)

An overview of the issue will be provided by:

  • Tomas Sobotka, Deputy Director, Vienna Institute of Demography & Wittgenstein Centre (Austria)

Moderator:

  • Stan Becker, Professor (emeritus), Johns Hopkins University (United States)

Q&A Moderator: 

  • Apoorva Jadhav, Senior Fellow, Population Reference Bureau (United States)

Introduction and conclusion: 

  • Laura Rodriguez Wong, Professor of Demography Cedeplar, Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil)

 

Apply Now for the UC Davis/UC Alianza MX Summer School on the “Economics of Migration” (04/05/26)

Applications are now open through April 5, 2026 for the 5th Summer School on the Economics of Migration, which will take place July 20–24, 2026, at Casa de California in Mexico City. The program is open to PhD students (2nd–6th year), postdoctoral researchers, and early-career scholars in economics and related quantitative social sciences across the Americas who work on migration-related topics. The four-day program combines faculty lectures on frontier research in migration economics with student presentations of research ideas or drafts, providing participants with feedback and opportunities to build mentoring relationships and research networks. Meals and lodging will be covered by the program, while participants are responsible for their travel to Mexico City. Applications require a CV and either a research paper draft or a one-page proposal.

Grand Challenges RFP: Evaluating AI-Enabled Decision Support Tools for Frontline Workers in Primary and Community Health Care Settings (04/01/26)

The Global Partnerships & Grand Challenges Team has launched a new Request for Proposals (RFP) on “Evaluating AI-Enabled Decision Support Tools for Frontline Workers in Primary and Community Health Care Settings.” Applications are due by April 1, 2026. Please read the RFP carefully for more information on the challenge and opportunity, eligibility, requirements, and timelines. This is the first RFP issued through the newly launched Evidence for AI in Health (EVAH) initiative, which is co-funded by the Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Wellcome and will be implemented in partnership with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the African Population and Health Research Center.

AI has the potential to transform many aspects of health care, but there are significant gaps in the availability of evidence on how AI tools perform in real-world health settings in low-and middle-income countries. The EVAH initiative aims to address that gap, with the first RFP focused on AI-enabled decision support tools designed to assist frontline workers with clinical tasks such as triage, diagnosis, and referral in primary and community health care settings in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

The RFP will support two types of evaluations:

  • Pathway A: supports real-world evaluation of AI-enabled clinical decision support tools that are early in deployment. The pathway focuses on how the tools perform in practice, including usability, workflow integration, adoption, and safety, and supports research that can inform future impact evaluations. Grants of up to USD $1,000,000 will be awarded for Evaluation Pathway A projects, with a project term of 3-12 months.
  • Pathway B: supports rigorous impact evaluations of AI-enabled clinical decision support tools that are ready to be deployed at scale. This pathway focuses on measuring the effects of these tools on health outcomes and system performance at scale. Grants of up to USD $3,000,000 will be awarded for Evaluation Pathway B projects, with a project term of 12–24 months.

Call for Applications: In-Person Residency 2026 on “Migration Politics and Violence” (04/06/26)

The editorial team of Migration Politics is seeking innovative and original paper proposals for the in-person residency taking place at the University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria, from 28 September to 2 October 2026. We invite submissions from scholars at all career stages conducting inspiring empirical or conceptual research on topics related to “Migration Politics and Violence”. Migration politics and violence are increasingly intertwined in contemporary societies, manifesting through structural, political and community-level forms of coercion and exclusion. We invite contributions that analyze how these forms of violence are produced, experienced, and contested within migration politics, and that examine their political causes and consequences across different contexts. Submissions should offer theoretical or empirically grounded insights into the ways violence shapes migration governance, migrant lives, and broader political dynamics. In case of empirical papers, data collection must be completed prior to submitting a paper proposal to the Migration Politics Residency Programme.

Deadline: April 6, 2026

See full ad: https://migrationpolitics.org/2026/02/24/call-for-in-person-residency-on-migration-politics-and-violence-2026/

Call for Applications: In-Person Residency 2026 on “Migration Politics and Violence” (04/06/26)

The editorial team of Migration Politics is seeking innovative and original paper proposals for the in-person residency taking place at the University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria, from 28 September to 2 October 2026. We invite submissions from scholars at all career stages conducting inspiring empirical or conceptual research on topics related to “Migration Politics and Violence”. Migration politics and violence are increasingly intertwined in contemporary societies, manifesting through structural, political and community-level forms of coercion and exclusion. We invite contributions that analyze how these forms of violence are produced, experienced, and contested within migration politics, and that examine their political causes and consequences across different contexts. Submissions should offer theoretical or empirically grounded insights into the ways violence shapes migration governance, migrant lives, and broader political dynamics. In case of empirical papers, data collection must be completed prior to submitting a paper proposal to the Migration Politics Residency Programme.

Improving Hiring Decisions: Experimental Evidence on the Value of Reference Information About Teacher Applicants – Dan Goldhaber

Parrington Hall Room 360

To Join By Zoom: Register HERE

We look forward to welcoming Dr. Dan Goldhaber from the University of Washington on Friday, April 3rd, in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative.

Professional references are widely used in hiring decisions, yet their effectiveness remains largely understudied. We analyze structured ratings collected from the professional references of teacher applicants and conduct an experiment to see whether the ratings influence hiring managers’ assessments of applicants and hiring decisions. We find little evidence that providing reference ratings to hiring managers influences their evaluations of candidates or hiring choices in productive ways. Importantly, we also find that reference ratings are predictive of future job performance. The result is a paradox: reference ratings offer potentially low-cost, high-value information, but hiring managers do not appear to make productive use of them.

Dr. Dan Goldhaber is the Director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR, cedr.us) at the University of Washington and the Director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER, caldercenter.org) at the American Institutes for Research. Both CEDR and CALDER use administrative data to do research that informs decisions about policy and practice.