Archives: Affiliates

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.

Development Sociology, Population & Development Program. Dissertation: Husband-Wife Communication and Family Planning in Egypt

Trained as a social demographer (in part by Professor Charles Hirschman during his years at Cornell), Win Brown has worked since the early 1980s in a variety of applied public health settings, mostly in the developing world. He spent nine years as a full faculty member at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, where he taught and advised cohorts of MPH and PhD students, many of whom have succeeded in international public health and academic careers. In his current position as Senior Program Officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Family Planning Strategy, he is responsible for conceptualizing, funding, and managing grants that contribute to the global measurement agenda in family planning and reproductive health.

Raoul Liévanos’ population studies research interests are in spatial demography, environmental inequality, disaster vulnerability, social disparities in food insecurity, residential segregation, individual- and neighborhood-level correlates of residential mortgage lending patterns, neighborhood change, geographic information systems, and spatial pattern analysis.

Julie Kmec’s research over the past decade has been devoted to gender and race/ethnic labor market inequality, work organizations, workplace diversity, and social stratification–specifically, addressing how the practices of work organizations shape the context of work for workers and for the firms that employ them. In the last decade she has published on these topics in American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, Work & Occupations, Social Science Research, and Gender & Society. She currently has two specific projects underway. The first with collaborator, Beth Hirsh, University of British Columbia-Vancouver, examines the connection between organizational human resource practices, formal complaints over discrimination, and race/sex segregation over time among U.S. work establishments. The second project examines the connection between parenthood and the labor market. Kmec has shed light on the mechanisms driving motherhood wage penalties and fatherhood wage bonuses. Using funding from WSU’s NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant, Kmec has studied the work behaviors of mothers, fathers, and non-parents in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and on-STEM fields, assessing whether cultural expectations of the “ideal” worker and the “ideal” mother and the different views of parenthood and job compatibility for women and men have implications for the productivity and job rewards of mothers and fathers in academia.

Zheng Wu is Professor of Gerontology and Canada Research Chair in Aging and Health at Simon Fraser University. He is also affiliated with University of Victoria’s Institute on Aging & Lifelong Health and Xi’an Jiaotong University’s Institute Population and Development Studies. His research interests reach across numerous aging-demographic topics, with long-standing interest in family demography. His current research program is concerned with trends and patterns of aging population in Canada, focusing on union formation and dissolution in later life, and physical and psychological wellbeing of older adults.

Eric Roth’s research has focused on the social epidemiology of HIV/AIDS, with research in Kenya and Canada exploring the interactions between cultural patterns and disease transmission. He is the author of the text, Culture, Biology and Anthropological Demography (Cambridge, 2004), and the co-editor with Elliot Fratkin (Smith College) of the book As Pastoralists Settle: Cultural, Health and Economic Consequences of Pastoral Sedentarization in Marsabit District, Kenya (Springer-Verlag, 2006). He has published in diverse peer-reviewed journals including American Anthropologist, Human Organization, Human Ecology, Culture, Health and Sexuality, International Journal of Drug Policy, Harm Reduction Journal, Drug and Alcohol Review, Sexual Research and Social Policy, Evolution and Human Behaviour and Health, Risk and Society. One current project includes a NIH-funded Center Grant (R24) linking the University of Washington, the University of Nairobi, and the University of Victoria in social epidemiology of female sex workers and their clients in the large informal settlement, or slum, called Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya. Another, funded by NIH and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), focuses on the sexual behavior of Men Who Have Sex with Men in Vancouver, British Columbia in light of the provincial expansion of HAART. A third, funded by CIHR, will examine health consequences for HIV+ women across Canada.

Mikael Jansson’s research is focused on the health of vulnerable populations as well as on research ethics and research methods. He applies his demographic training primarily to understand life transitions of street-involved youth and low prestige service workers in Canada, the United States and Kenya. In the five years he has published four books and 10 referred articles in journals including the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Addiction, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion, Qualitative Health Research, Harm Reduction Journal, International Journal of Behavioral Development, Journal of Mental Health, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and the Journal of Adolescence. In the last five years, he has received external funding from the NIH, the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). These grants are funding three large current projects that are involved with data collection in Kenya, Victoria BC and in six sites across Canada. He just completed the data collection on a two site, four wave panel sample in Victoria, BC Canada, and Sacramento California.

Merwan Engineer’s research over the past decade has been in the areas of demographic methods and models, development economics, and social well being. His work on demographic methods involves understanding the demographics of age-group societies, societies identified in the anthropology literature as organizing themselves according to age groups. His paper “Overlapping Generations Models of Graded Age-Set Societies” (The Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics) proves the equivalency between classes of models across the disciplines.

In other modeling work, “Choosing Longevity with Overlapping Generations” (The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics) examines health and savings decisions and shows that an economy can stagnate in a “poverty trap”. In a poverty trap individuals are poor and short lived. However, if the economy starts with enough wealth, it can “take off” and future generations will eventually become wealthy and long lived. This paper reveals when the initial level of wealth matters for intergenerational health and longevity outcomes.

In work on social well being, Engineer has developed improved indices of human development. In particular, he has developed a methodological analysis of the well-known Human Development Index. He has also modified the index to take into account the quality of life. This work is published in Social Indicators Research and Indian Growth and Development Review.