Archives: Affiliates

Helen Pineo is an urban planner and Research Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on how development, regeneration and urban policy can support health and sustainability. She contributes to the evidence base about why and how to do healthy urbanism by using transdisciplinary approaches and amplifying the needs of under-represented communities and the planet.

With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Helen is currently leading Change Stories, a research project that uses ethnographic methods to learn from the cultures, narratives and contexts that have supported shifts to equitable and sustainable development. She is co-investigator on a study investigating the health and health equality impacts of housing converted from non-residential buildings in England, funded by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research. Her past research has used participatory, systems thinking and other methods, to study: overcrowding and COVID, integration of health objectives in new property development, conceptualization of multi-scalar health impacts of urban environments (see Healthy Urbanism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), evidence use in government policy and decision-making, and urban health indicators and their use by planners.

Ipsita Dey is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas Department. She comes to UW Seattle from Princeton University, where she received her PhD in Anthropology. Her work is at the intersection of Pacific Island Studies, Indigeneity Studies, South Asian Diaspora Studies, Environmental Anthropology, and ethnographic ethics. Ipsita’s current book project, “Home on the Fijian Farmscape”, explores how Indo-Fijians articulate connections to land and country through agricultural practice, claiming a complex mode of diasporic nativity in response to resurgent Fijian indigenous ethno-nationalist politics

Morgan P. Vickers is an Assistant Professor of Race/Racialization in the Department of Law, Societies & Justice at the University of Washington. Vickers researches racialized ecologies, 20th-century infrastructure projects, and eco-social repair.

Vickers received their Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and their B.A. in American Studies, Communication Studies, and Non-Fiction Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Black Studies Collaboratory.

Vickers is currently a Content Editor for Environmental History Now and an Executive Board member of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). They previously worked with The Black Geographic, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Community Histories Workshop, A Red Record, and the Landscape Specialty Group of AAG.

Drew Messamore is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington. Messamore’s research examines the rising popularity and formalization of rental landlording in the United States, as well as how a new generation of urban housing movements are confronting urban inequalities.

He has also published widely on the use of quantitative and computational methodologies in social science. You can find his work in Social Problems, Social Networks, Urban Studies, Social Currents, Social Psychology Quarterly, Administration & Society, and Socius.

Messamore earned his BA in Sociology form the University of Texas Austin, his MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, his PhD in Philosophy and Sociology from University of Texas at Austin.

Patrick Trent Greiner’s research centers on providing greater insight into the complex co-constitution of social inequalities, environmental changes, and their consequences. His teaching interests center on the theories and methods that facilitate understanding of simultaneous and reciprocal change in social and ecological systems as well. Professor Greiner’s work has been published in journals such as Environmental Sociology, Environmental Research Letters, Nature + Culture, The Journal of Land Use Science, The Journal of Classical Sociology, Rural Sociology, and Human Ecology Review, among others. He has written and had his work highlighted in a number of international periodicals and news outlets, such as The Conversation, El Globo News, and Phys as well.

Greiner received his BA in Politics and Policy from Washington State University, and his MS and PhD in Sociology from University of Oregon. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Studies, and the 2022-2024 C Family Dean’s Faculty Fellow of Grand Challenges in Climate and Society at Vanderbilt University. To learn more, go HERE

Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice in the Law, Societies & Justice Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is affiliated with the Center for Environmental Politics and the Science, Technology, and Society Studies Interdisciplinary Group. He is also a Research Affiliate of the Human Contexts and Ethics of Data Program at UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. 

Dr. Rubiano-Galvis is a researcher and educator at the intersection of critical environmental social sciences and science and technology studies. His work studies the political ecologies of extraction and toxicity and the politics of environmental knowledge, technology, and legal expertise in Colombia and Latin America. Broadly, he is interested in how science, technology, and the law shape and are shaped by people’s relations with their environments and resources, especially in polluted and extractive landscapes. He draws on concepts from political ecology, science and technology studies, and global environmental politics and use interpretive social science methods and qualitative analysis. 

His current research includes projects on the global governance of mercury and the “datification” of environmental education, science, and policy. His doctoral research studied the history and politics of mercury amalgamation in gold mining in Colombia and the broader circulation of said technique in the Americas over the last three centuries. His work has appeared in Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Ambix, and Triología: Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, as well as in several edited volumes, and has been funded by Fulbright, UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies, and the US Department of Education. 

He teaches about global environmental politics, environmental justice, environment and society, and the socio-political dimensions of science, technology, and data. He has taught introductory courses on social sciences to STEM majors and law students and professional certificates in environmental law and policy. 

As part of his public scholarship, he has consulted for various research centers and environmental nonprofit institutions in Colombia and collaborated with various Indigenous and human rights organizations in Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. He serves on the board of the Colombia-based Center for Marine Justice, and he previously worked as Research Director of Environmental Justice at Dejusticia.

In 2022, he completed a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management with an emphasis on Society and Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds degrees in Geography and Law from the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. Before joining UW in 2024, he was a Gerardo Marin Postdoctoral Fellow and an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco’s International Studies Department. 

Jason Kerwin is currently a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and a Brimmer Distinguished Scholar at the University of Washington, an Affiliated Professor at J-PAL, and a Research Fellow at IZA. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, where he was also an Economic Demography Trainee at Michigan’s Population Studies Center. From 2015 to 2024 he was on the faculty of the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. Jason’s research focuses on understanding the choices people in developing countries make about health, education, employment, and savings. To do this he combines randomized field experiments and other compelling causal inference methods with cutting-edge methods from econometrics and machine learning.  Jason has done fieldwork in Malawi, Uganda, India, and Egypt. His papers have been published in journals that include the American Economic Review, the Journal of Econometrics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Development Economics.

Magali Blanco is an environmental exposure scientist with additional training in epidemiology, biostatistics, and data science. Her current research interests are around air pollution exposure assessment, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), and social disparities. The focus of her recently funded diversity MOSAIC K99/R00 is to better understand the mechanisms by which air pollution may impact Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) neuropathologies. This research will leverage her training and interests in air pollution monitoring design, quantitative exposure assessment, environmental health, ADRD, exposure mixtures, and advanced epidemiology.

Sana Khalil is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Washington Tacoma. Dr. Khalil obtained her doctoral degree in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September 2022, where she was a US Fulbright doctoral fellow and received the 2018 Solomon Barkin Award for best research on improving the conditions of the working class. Her research interests are in applied microeconomics and econometrics, centered on exploring social and economic inequalities. In her research, she integrates experimental and quasi-experimental techniques with qualitative surveys to explore issues in labor economics, behavioral economics, environmental resourcemanagement, and gender and development. Her current research spans three interconnected strands: (1) Household water insecurities in Pakistan; (2) Cousin marriage, intrahousehold dynamics, and their impact
on women’s paid work, and (3) labor market inequalities and employers’ hiring practices.

Leah Marcotte is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington (UW), a health services researcher, and a primary care physician. Her research is focused on using community-engaged and implementation research methods in collaboration with community partners and health system leaders to sustainably improve equity and quality in cancer screening.

Prior to pursuing a career as a physician scientist, Dr. Marcotte worked in public policy and in health systems administration, most recently serving as Associate Medical Director for Population Health for the UW health system (2018-2020). In that role, she was exposed to a learning health system model with a focus in health equity in which we partnered with researchers to design and evaluate novel interventions for population health outreach. The experience of leveraging research methods to inform health systems interventions with the goal of improving quality and equity in care motivated me toward a career as a physician scientist. She pursued and was awarded a K12 learning health systems research grant to transition to a career in research. Having not had formal research methods training, she completed a Master of Science degree in Health Services at UW School of Public Health in 2022. She is currently working on a K08 Mentored Clinical Scientist Research Career Development Award proposal focused on addressing breast cancer screening inequities to submit to the National Cancer Institute (NCI).