Zack W. Almquist is CSDE’s Training Core PI and co-chair of CSDE’s Primary Research Area – Demographic Measurements and Methods (with Adrian Raftery). He serves on CSDE’s Executive Committee, and leads the Computational Demography Working Group which meets on Mondays at 4:30-5:30 PM virtually. He is also an Assistant Professor of Sociology, a Senior Data Science Fellow in the eScience Institute, and Training Director for the OBSSR T32 in Data Science Training in Demography and Population Health. Almquist holds affiliations at  Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS), Urban@UW and the Center for Environmental Politics. He serves on the Editorial Boards for the journals Social Networks, Sociological Perspectives, Population and Environment, and Sociological Methodology; and as the Secretary Treasurer of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Mathematical Sociology. Almquist’s dissertation won the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association’s section on Mathematical Sociology, and he is a recipient of the Army Research Office’s Young Investigator Award. He has received other awards including the Best Methodological Poster from the Political Networks Conference and UCI’s A. Kimball Romney Award for Outstanding Graduate Paper. Prof Almquist’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, the National Institutes of Health, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Washington.

Before he held his current positions with University of Washington, Almquist was a Research Scientist on the Demography and Survey Science team at Facebook, Inc from 2018-2020; a Visiting Scholar in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University from 2017-2018; and an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of Minnesota from 2013-2018

His research centers on the development and application of mathematical, computational and statistical methodology to problems and theory of social networks, demography, education, homelessness, and environmental action and governance. Currently, his research program is focused on understanding, modeling, and predicting the effects that space (geography) and time have on human interaction (communication or needle sharing) and social processes (information passing or disease transmission). Dr Almquist’s research has been published in highly regarded peer-reviewed journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Sociological Methodology, Mathematical Population Studies, American Journal of Human Biology and Political Analysis.

Belinda is the Grants Manager for the UW’s Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology. Prior to joining CSDE in 2020, Belinda was a Fiscal Specialist with the UW Alcohol & Drug Abuse Institute (2002-20), where her pre- and post-award responsibilities include assisting with grant proposal preparation and monitoring budgets for compliance. Belinda is also the former Director of Development for Coffee House Press in Minneapolis. Belinda’s extracurricular activities include fundraising for the National Multiple Sclerosis Foundation as a team captain for Walk MS, and for the American Cancer Society as a team captain for Making Strides against Breast Cancer.

Moris Vrachovski graduated from Edmonds Community College with an A.A. in Information Security and Digital Forensics. Currently, he is working on completing his B.A. in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance. He has experience in cybersecurity monitoring, information security administration, and as a security analyst. He is interested in security, pen testing, incident response, malware analysis, social engineering, and CTF events.

Deven Hamilton is a Senior Research Scientist and Engineer  at CSDE. Hamilton earned a PhD and an MA in Sociology at the University of Washington. Prior to his time spent at UW, he studied at Emory University where he earned an MPH in Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, and a BS in both Sociology and Biology.

Deven Hamilton is a broadly trained sociologist and epidemiologist who has been an active researcher in the field of HIV/AIDS for 19 years including, several years as a research scientist in the private and academic sectors. Much of his work has focused on building agent based network models of HIV transmission in order to further our understanding of how the structure of the contact network and their interaction with behavior impacts HIV transmission dynamics and thereby the distribution of risk across populations. Hamilton has been working with world-renowned leaders in the field of network analysis and network epidemiology since 2001 and he is currently serving as a site PI on a CDC funded five-year cooperative agreement as well as a Co-Investigator and area expert on multiple NIH funded projects, all with the goal of designing a building modeling tools to further our understanding of HIV/STI transmission in different populations and contexts.

Phil Hurvitz joined CSDE as a research scientist in 2019 to lead the UW Data Collaborative, a high-performance, high-capacity data storage and computing cluster that allows researchers at the UW to access and analyze data that contain highly sensitive personal or health information (e.g., Add Health, CMS-Medicare, IBM MarketScan) to support innovative, interdisciplinary research and evidence-driven policy making. The UWDC servers allow users to access these data sets through a secure and encrypted remote desktop interface and to perform analysis on centralized servers, analogously to “cold rooms” that housed sensitive data on computers with no network access. There are two major benefits to this new approach: (1) multiple researchers may access data simultaneously, whereas cold rooms could only support one researcher at a time, and (2) data sets that may have been available to only single researchers or labs can be used by multiple researchers, many of which would not have been able to obtain these data. The UWDC achieves its secure functionality through network segmentation, virtual private networks, and dual-factor authentication, so that users can log in and perform analysis, but any data transfers out of the secure environment are carefully reviewed to be stripped of any identifiable information. The UWDC serves a broad user group at the UW, including researchers from Sociology, Geography, Real Estate, Pharmacy, and Public Health. He works closely with CSDE’s IT group to assure that the servers are maintained to provide a high level of performance and a high level of security.

In addition to his role supporting the UWDC, Phil has been been involved in CSDE’s instructional mission. He has taught CSDE 502, a practical course in “data wrangling”, and he has led several workshops, including “Reproducible GIS analysis with R,” which introduces the use of R’s sf package for geographic information system work flows, “R and Relational Databases,” which introduces the use of R for storage and analysis of tabular data within PostgreSQL and other SQL databases, and “Microsoft Word for the Social Sciences,” an overview of using Word’s often overlooked built-in features for reduction of busy-work to create consistently formatted and easily editable documents.

Phil is also available for research support and consulting for students, staff, and faculty as part of CSDE’s research support infrastructure. He can provide guidance on geographic information systems analysis, database management, processing of large data sets, use of ubiquitous sensing devices such as global positioning system data loggers and accelerometers, and automation of data processing.

Phil’s role within UrbDP is mainly as a researcher and informatics lead within the Urban Form Lab (UFL). He has been involved with the UFL since 2003. The UFL does research focusing on quantitative analysis of environment and human behavior, with particular focus on built environment and health- and transportation-related behavior. He has provided leadership in data development and analysis on many large extramurally funded projects.

At he UFL, he has acted as the informatics lead and GIS analyst for several NIH-funded studies investigating the relationship between built environment and health-related behaviors (R01 CA178343, R01 HL091881, R01 HL103478, R01 AG042176, R01 DK076608, R01 NR016942, R01 DK114196, R01 HD091089), including the management and analysis of a total of over 3,000 person-weeks of GPS and accelerometry data. Using data from several of these studies, I developed algorithms for estimating time-based exposure to environmental features using GPS and GIS data.

Previous to his appointment in CSDE, he was GIS Specialist and Lecturer in the UW College of Forest Resources (1997-2004), Research Assistant (2004-2010) and Research Associate (2011-2012) at the UW Urban Form Lab, and Research Assistant Professor (2012-2019) in the UW Department of Urban Design and Planning. He has also promoted and supported use of GIS at UW since 1997 as the lead contact for the UW’s site license with Esri and manager of the UW GIS Listserv, UW-GIS-L.

Phil received his Master of Forest Resources degree from the UW College of Forest Resources in 1994 and his PhD in Urban Design and Planning at UW in 2010. See Phil’s curriculum vitae.

Jonathan Wakefield’s primary research area is in the development of methods for spatial epidemiology with a particular interest in sources of, and methods for the removal of, ecological bias. He studies Bayesian data analysis, statistical methods in epidemiology, spatial epidemiology, and pharmacodynamic models. This interest began when he was the head of the Statistics group within the Small Area Health Statistics Unit at Imperial College. This government funded unit carried out investigations using routinely collected cancer data in the United Kingdom, primarily to determine the role of the environment. Wakefield has worked in study design with a series of papers developing a case-control within ecological design which is both powerful and removes ecological bias via the judicial choice of cases and controls. In a similar vein, two-phase methods have also been applied in the spatial context. A different endeavor is cluster detection (surveillance) with Wakefield and Albert Kim (a recent graduate student in the Statistics department) developing a Bayesian method that overcomes many of the drawbacks of frequentist methods (multiple testing and inability to discuss more than one cluster in a dataset). More recently, Wakefield has been working on infectious disease data, specifically data on malaria and hand, foot and mouth disease. The website http://faculty.washington.edu/jonno/spatialepi.html contains details on Wakefield’s work in spatial epidemiology.

Steven Goodreau’s research has two related themes: how does the complex biobehavioral ecology of HIV produce disparities in disease burden within and between populations; and how can we make more statistically sound use of social network data to understand the structure of populations and the flow of infections or other entities within them?

Since joining the UW faculty seven years ago, he has published on these topics in Demography, AIDS, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Genetics, Social Networks, the Journal of Infectious Disease, AIDS and Behavior, and eight others.

Goodreau currently has five ongoing projects. The first, part of NIH’s Modeling Prevention Packages Program (MP3), aims to identify ways to better package and target HIV prevention interventions for men who have sex with men (MSM) in the Americas. Within this large multidisciplinary team, Goodreau is director of the modeling group, which is analyzing data on sexual behavior, demography, testing, and treatment among MSM in the US, Peru and Brazil; and using these data to parameterize dynamic HIV transmission network models to explore the potential impact of a host of biological and behavioral intervention packages. The second project, funded by the Gates Foundation, entails extending this analysis to MSM in India and Kenya, to begin developing a more refined comparative understanding of the nature of MSM HIV epidemics globally. The third project, Metromates, integrates behavioral data on post-HIV-diagnosis behavior change among MSM with virological data on acute infection into network models to explore the potential impact of different HIV testing strategies on reduction in risk behavior at the point when men are most infectious. The fourth project, just beginning, extends the work that the Social Network Modeling Group (also including Martina Morris at UW; Mark Handcock at UCLA, Carter Butts at UC-Irvine, and Dave Hunter at Penn State) have done over the past decade on developing user-friendly statistically grounded models and tools for social network analysis. The group’s current R packages (www.statnetproject.org) will be expanded to incorporate additional dynamics, forms of missing data, and epidemic modeling tools; the project also has a strong emphasis on providing training in these tools. The final project, A Kenya Free of AIDS (Martina Morris, PI), is a capacity-building grant for HIV prevention in Kenya; Goodreau’s role is to train African scholars in epidemic modeling so as to be better consumers of the literature that plays a major role in determining prevention and care priorities in sub-Saharan Africa, using a variety of novel pedagogical approaches that he and Dr. Morris have developed.