Anqi Xu is a Demographic Research Specialist for the California Department of Finance. Her work broadly focuses on demography, urban economics, and public policy. Her research blends quantitative spatial data with critical humanistic inquiry to analyze demographic changes impacted by housing affordability, family structure, climate change, and racial inequality.
She specializes in econometrics, geospatial analysis, and mapping. She also works with statistical tools including STATA, SPSS, R, and Python. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Urban Affairs, Population Research and Policy Review, Habitat International, etc.
Prior to working as a demographer at the State of California, her work focused on residential segregation, immigration, and urban planning.
Min Hee Kim is a population health scholar and postdoctoral fellow at the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. Her overarching research seeks to bridge studies of social/environmental determinants of health and health service research to advance theoretical understanding of how health inequities are generated at the population level and inform policy and community-level interventions.
Her current research is organized around three lines of inquiry: 1) Examining the role of education policies for racial/ethnic integration and choice on health inequities among the US children and adults, 2) Understanding whether and how neighborhood disadvantage generates health inequities in a diverse population, including refugee population in Denmark, 3) Validating the measure of timely diagnosis of dementia and quantifying structural determinants (i.e., racial segregation and geographic distribution of health care resources) associated with racial disparities in delayed dementia diagnosis.
Sarfraz Khan (PhD 2017 Social Anthropology, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, Pakistan) has a vast teaching and research experience in different Pakistani universities which spans over 17 years. Currently he is working as an Assistant Professor in the School of Sociology, Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad. He has been working on cross-cutting transnational migration issues within the context of Pakistan. He is one of the founding members of the Health and Migration Research Network and has organized a collaborative international conference on Health and Migration (December 2019). His research interests include irregular/undocumented migration, remittances, gender, education, and health. He will be focusing on the project “Family Aspirations in Conflict with Legislation: Agency, Structure and Culture of Irregular Migration in Pakistan” for his postdoctoral fellowship stay under Fulbright Scholar Program 2022-23 at University of Washington, Seattle.
Stephanie Cook is a James Weldon Johnson Professor and Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Social & Behavioral Health at New York University. She has wide expertise in the development of statistical models for determining associations between biological and behavioral risk factors and health outcomes in large population-based cohort and intervention study designs. She is the Director of the Attachment and Health Disparities Research Laboratory at NYU’s School of Global Public Health where she and her research team conducted research and intervention studies that focus on evaluating the mechanistic links between minority stressors and health disparities (social and biological) in emerging adulthood.
Dr. Stephanie Cook’s overarching research focus is to understand how structural- and individual-level minority stressors contribute to mental health, physical health, and health behaviors across the life span. Further, she seeks to understand how features of close relationships can exacerbate or buffer the negative effects of minority stress on health. Her work primarily focuses on young adults transitioning to adulthood who are at the intersection of racial/ethnic and sexual orientation status. In addition, much of her current work examines the links between minority stress (i.e., daily experiences of discrimination) and biological markers of stress (e.g. cortisol and c-reactive protein).
Dr. Cook and her team’s long-term goal is to continue creating, implementing, and refining sustainable interventions to reduce the influence of stress on health utilizing innovative methodologies.
Steven Bourassa is H. Jon and Judith M. Runstad Endowed Professor and Chair of the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Previously, he served as department chair at Florida Atlantic University, the University of Auckland, and the University of Louisville, where he was KHC Real Estate Research Professor. His research focuses on urban housing and land markets and policy, covering a range of topics including housing tenure, residential property valuation, property taxation, housing affordability, low-income housing policy, community land trusts, and public land leasehold. He has published his research in numerous real estate and related journals, such as the Journal of Housing Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Journal of Real Estate Research, and Journal of Urban Economics, as well as Real Estate Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, and Urban Studies. His co-edited book, Leasing Public Land: Policy Debates and International Experiences, was published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Dr. Bourassa is on the editorial boards of eight real estate journals. He is a Fellow of the Weimer School of Advanced Studies in Real Estate and Land Economics and received the Research Achievement Award from the International Real Estate Society, of which he is a past President. He is currently Treasurer of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
S. Joseph Shin is an Assistant Professor of Management at University of Washington, Tacoma. His research focus is on the nexus of organization theory, strategy, and entrepreneurship. He aims to enhance scholarly knowledge about the entrepreneurial growth and scaling of high-growth nascent ventures in technology-based industries known as unicorn ventures. A unicorn venture is a private firm valued at more than one billion dollars. Using an extensive and novel longitudinal dataset and robust identification strategy, he attempts to better understand the antecedents and consequences of ventures’ high growth and fast-paced scaling.
Michelle Shin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing at the University of Washington (UW) School of Nursing (SON). Prior to joining UW SON, she completed postdoctoral training in Population Health Sciences focusing on implementation science and cancer equity with Dr. Jennifer Tsui in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. As a public health nurse researcher with academic background in cervical cancer prevention (human papillomavirus [HPV] vaccination and HPV self-sampling) and clinical experience in safety-net clinic settings, her work focuses on application of implementation science methods to improve cancer care delivery for medically underserved populations.
She also obtained additional training in multilevel intervention research in cancer at the Multilevel Intervention Training Institute (MLTI), which is hosted by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences.
Lianne Sheppard is the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professor in Public Health Sciences at the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS) and Professor in the UW Department of Biostatistics. In 2021, Dr. Sheppard was named to the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professorship, which supports faculty with expertise in the health impacts of chemical exposures. Her current research portfolio includes several studies of air pollution exposures and their neurotoxicant effects. She has a PhD in biostatistics.
Her methodological interests center on observational study methods, exposure modeling, study design, and epidemiology. Her applied research focuses on the health effects of occupational and environmental exposures. She is principal investigator of a NIH-funded training grant called Biostatistics, Epidemiologic & Bioinformatics Training in Environmental Health, and she oversees the SURE-EH training program, a project to promote diversity in the environmental health sciences. She is also co-principal investigator of the NIH-funded Adult Changes in Thought Air Pollution study and of a Health Effects Institute study to better understand the role of exposure assessment design and modeling in inference about air pollution health effects.
Dr. Sheppard provides biostatistical leadership for several projects. She collaborates with DEOHS faculty on air pollution cohort studies, identifying the effects of multi-pollutant exposures as well as manganese exposures. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 2021, she was named chair of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.
Dr. Sheppard is Chair of the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and a member of the EPA Scientific Advisory Board. She currently serves on the National Research Council Committee for the Review of EPA’s 2021 Formaldehyde Assessment, as well as the Environmental Sciences Review Panel of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. She is a former member of the Health Effects Institute Review Committee and has served on several EPA scientific advisory panels, most recently for the Carcinogenic Potential of Glyphosate and the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Science Advisory Committee On Chemicals (SACC) Asbestos Panel.
Rachel Prusynski is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Physical Therapy in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington. Her research agenda is to inform equitable policy and facilitate quality evidence-based rehabilitative care to reduce disability, especially for socioeconomically vulnerable patients. She is a health services researcher focusing on relationships between rehabilitation processes and outcomes in post-acute care, with an emphasis on the impact of health policy on therapy practice and patient outcomes. Her work examines policies and system factors impacting the fragmented skilled nursing facility (SNF) industry, where variability in therapy practice and outcomes is especially high and rehabilitation research lags compared to other healthcare settings.
As a physical therapist, board-certified neurologic specialist, and therapy instructor with ten years of experience in settings with limited resources such as Haiti, she has experienced firsthand the myriad systemic challenges in providing evidence-based care and gaps in access to care for historically marginalized groups. Encountering these systematic barriers has led to her interest in implementation science, policy, and translational health services research.
Her PhD coursework was designed around three cognates: Large Data Analysis, Health Services and Policy, and Global Implementation Science. Her dissertation was supported by the American Physical Therapy Association Health Policy & Administration Research Grant, a Foundation for Physical Therapy Research scholarship, and the University of Washington Institute for Translational Health Science (ITHS) TL1 training program. She has published multiple studies using large data to address gaps in the knowledge of baseline relationships between rehabilitation processes and patient outcomes in SNFs prior to 2019 Medicare Patient Driven Payment Model (PDPM).
Julianne Meisner is a veterinarian and epidemiologist and early-stage investigator. Her research combines her dual training to tackle complex questions surrounding human health risks at the human-animal-environment interface, largely focused on the effect of livestock keeping on human health among rural communities. Her position as a veterinarian in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington is unique, simultaneously fostering both independence and innovation in her research, and depth in her collaborative network. Her burgeoning research track is situated within both epidemiologic methods and One Health research, affording her the opportunity to bridge gaps between these two communities and identify nuances inherent to research questions at the human-animal-interface that have been previously overlooked.
Most recently, she has been working to bring network modeling (a tool borrowed from the social sciences and increasingly applied to infectious disease epidemiology) to the human-animal interface. She believes this approach holds great promise for early detection of novel pathogen emergence, and for refined control of endemic zoonoses. Her work also tackles social and political determinants of health from a One Health framework; she recently developed a Political One Health theoretical framework, which underpins recent efforts to examine land tenure and governance among minoritized populations as critical drivers of land use change, widely accepted to be a major determinant of novel pathogen emergence.