Archives: Affiliates

Dr. Dan Goldhaber is the Director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR) and an Affiliate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. He is also the Director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) and a Vice-President at American Institutes of Research (AIR). Dan previously served as an elected member of the Alexandria City School Board from 1997-2002, as an Associate Editor of Economics of Education Review and an editor of Education Finance and Policy.

Dan’s work focuses on issues of educational productivity and reform at the K-12 level, the broad array of human capital policies that influence the composition, distribution, and quality of teachers in the workforce, and connections between students’ K-12 experiences and postsecondary outcomes. Topics of published work in this area include studies of the stability of value-added measures of teachers, the effects of teacher qualifications and quality on student achievement, and the impact of teacher pay structure and licensure on the teacher labor market. Previous work has covered topics such as the relative efficiency of public and private schools, and the effects of accountability systems and market competition on K-12 schooling.

Elena Erosheva’s research focuses on the development and application of modern statistical methods to address important issues in the social sciences, broadly defined. As a statistical methodologist, she works in the area of multivariate and longitudinal data analysis (e.g., mixed membership and latent variable modeling). In collaboration with students and colleagues, she has developed a number of mixed membership model extensions that received a range of applications. For example, incorporating deterministic mixture components in mixed membership models has proved to be useful for describing the structure of functional disability in the U.S. population of elderly persons, for analyzing biomedical data from diagnostic tests in the absence of gold standard, and for analyzing public policy priorities from survey data. Likewise, using National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS) data to study disability trends in the U.S., she has developed group-based latent class transition models that account for rolling enrollment and differential drop-out, critical design features of the NLTCS. The corresponding analysis has confirmed that functional disability among the elderly population in the U.S. has declined from 1984 to 1999 and also found that, contrary to the mainstream opinion, this trend has reversed itself from 1999 to 2004. As another example of her research, in collaboration with CSDE affiliate Ross Matsueda, she has developed a hierarchical Bayesian curve registration framework for modeling longitudinal behavioral data such as observations from various types of individual crime trajectories. She has also worked on a project that focuses on developing a framework for assessing feasibility of Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) in collaboration with Mark Handcock. This project develops simulation studies that can shed light on the question of whether RDS studies are warranted for a specific population.

Clair Yang is an incoming junior faculty member at the Jackson School of International Studies. Her research bridges a wide range of topics in political economy, economic development, and business and politics. Her current projects study the impact of historical institutions on long-run economic development and population welfare, and the role of social networks in institutional development.

Carole Lee studies the allocation of major resources among scholars – in particular, co-authorship relationships, publication outcomes, grant awards, and scientific prizes – and their distribution across the scholarly population by gender and race. To study these, she and her collaborators have been looking at co-authorship relationships across the JSTOR corpus (by gender), grant award outcomes at the National Institutes of Health (by race), grant award outcomes at other intramural agencies (by gender, degree type, and seniority), and the awarding of scientific prizes (by gender). Her collaborators include faculty in Statistics, Information Science, Sociology, and Biology, as well as organizations such as the Center for Scientific Review at the National Institutes of Health, the Association for Women in Science, and the American Institute of Biological Sciences. The mission behind her work, as a philosopher of science, is to understand scientific practice with an eye towards improving it. Because of the practical, policy-oriented nature of her work, she is glad to have connections – through her research and service – to a number of stakeholder institutions, including the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines, NIH, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Doris Duke Foundation, and Templeton Foundation.

There are a number of ways her research connects with CSDE’s focus on Demographic Measurements and Methods. She has worked towards introducing new concepts and methods for measuring biases in the allocation of journal pages and grant dollars. In recent work, she introduced the notion of “commensuration bias” in grant and journal review, where these biases can work against not only women, racial/ethnic minorities, and junior researchers – commensuration bias can also lead other problematic patterns in publication and funding across science (Lee 2015). Along these lines, she and her collaborator Elena Erosheva (Department of Statistics) created new methods for measuring commensuration bias. In recognition of these ideas, they won First Prize in the category of Most Creative Idea for Detection of Bias in Peer Review in the Center for Scientific Review’s America COMPETES Act Challenge competition (National Institutes of Health). This work has been published in Science Advances and covered by the media, including by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Thaïsa Way is an urban landscape historian teaching history, theory, and design in the Department of Landscape Architecture, College of Built Environments and the Executive Director of Urban@UW, an initiative of the UW Office of Research in partnership with CoMotion and the eSciences Institute at the University of Washington, Seattle. Urban@UW brings scholars in urban research, teaching, and practice together to collaborate and collectively generate knowledge that will support the stewardship of healthy, sustainable, resilient, and equitable urban futures. I am honored to serve as an affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. She is also a leader on the Executive Committee for the UW Population Health Initiative and serve on the steering committee for the eSciences Institute.

Thaïsa is editor of two collections of essays on urban research as well as author of three books and four book-chapters, eleven peer-reviewed articles, seventeen essays in professional and practice publications, and numerous invited essays. She has been awarded sixteen grants for research, teaching, and publications, with a NSF/NRT collaborative grant applications currently in process. She has presented twenty refereed scholarly papers, chaired sixteen symposia and/or conference sessions, and have been invited to give over sixty lectures on four continents. Additionally, she has served as guest editor for three journal issues and as curator for three exhibits. She was also honored by the American Academy of Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture for 2016

She contributes to the CSDE’s Priority Research Area of Environments and Population through a study of human resilience and adaptation to climate change, the role of neighborhoods in conditioning human behavior, and specifically the influence of public space in the urban context. Thaïsa’s scholarship addresses issues of gender history, urban history, and resilience. While she has published scholarship in feminist histories of design, my current research is focused on urban design history, public space, and community resilience. In this area she is focused on research methods, demographic and otherwise that explore population health and wellbeing. As a historian she has done archival research. She contributes to the CSDE Priority Research Area of Demographic Measures & Methods through her collaborations in data science as it is applied to urban science. Her work with the eScience Institute has catalyzed the new urban analytics lab to build research and scholarship around urban data. It is part of a larger effort to apply big data technology and data science to critical urban questions and challenges.

Finally, Thaïsa is a teacher and mentor for undergraduates and graduate students in each of the areas in which she does scholarship: landscape architecture, architecture, history, and gender studies. Education and training of the next generation of urban researchers is critical to her and she strives to best prepare students for the complex challenges that lay ahead.

Jamein is a trained economist in the fields of Labor and Demography with primary interests in the economics of crime, law, and social capital. His research agenda currently consists of four large overarching themes related to institutional discrimination and access to social justice, the interaction between local governance and civil disorders, crime and criminal justice, and race and economic inequality.

Clara Berridge’s research focuses on the ethical and policy implications of digital technologies used in elder care. She studies data and information technologies, such as remote monitoring systems and social robots, as well as the surveillance incentivized by AI of older adults and care workers. Across projects, she’s often thinking about privacy, power, and decision making about technology use. Dr. Berridge has also studied positive aging paradigms and nursing home culture change. She recently developed Let’s Talk Tech, an online tool to help people living with mild dementia participate knowledgeably in decisions about technology use in their care.

Dr. Berridge is adjunct faculty in the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, core faculty in the University’s Disability Studies Program, and an affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research at Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley and an M.S.W. from the University of Washington.

In 2011, Claus C Pörtner joined Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Econmics as an Assistant Professor of Economics. He previously worked at the University of Washington, Brown University, Georgetown University, and worked as a consultant for the World Bank in Washington, DC, and Ghana. His research interests include household and population economics, development, and labor. He has published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Population Economics, and Journal of African Economies. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses focusing mainly on development and population issues.

Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar, PhD, is a global sociologist who made a career shift into applied research in government, philanthropy, and now founded her own research consulting practice in order to make research and evaluation resources more accessible to grassroots entities. She was a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellow (now known as Leading Edge) who spent 6 years at the City of Seattle as Impact and Assessment Manager helping to transform and operationalize research, data, and assessment with a community lens. She most recently was Project Lead on a Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative on Procurement Transformation, and was embedded in the Mayor’s Innovation and Performance Team/City Budget Office. Today, Dr. Nguyen-Akbar is Principal and Founder of Community and Cultural Impact Partners.

 

Some of her research interests include:

• Arts and cultural policy and administration
• Inclusion in creative industries, the creative economy, and emerging artist support networks
• Promising practices in grantmaking
• Community-engaged research methods
• Local and global ethnographic methods
• Vietnam and diasporic studies

Connect with her here!  LinkedIn | PhD Scholarly writings can be found here.