Anna Zamora-Kapoor earned her Ph.D. and Masters in Sociology from Columbia University, and her B.A. in Sociology from the University of Barcelona. She conducted her graduate studies with three multi-year awards from the Caja Madrid Foundation, the Talentia Fellowship, and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellowship at Columbia. Anna was also a pre-doctoral Visiting Scholar at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, where she worked with Prof. Sara Curran. After a position as Postdoctoral Senior Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a member of the University of Washington’s Partnerships for Native Health, she became an Assistant Research Professor for the Initiative for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH) with Washington State University, and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Department of Medical Education and Clinical Sciences at Washington State University. Her research seeks to reveal the social determinants of obesity, their variability across racial and ethnic groups, and the role of food distribution programs in the reproduction of health disparities.
Anna recently became the Principal Investigator of a pilot grant which leverages data from the Cerebrovascular Disease and its Consequences in American Indians (CDCAI) study to examine sex differences in the associations between obesity and cognitive performance among CDCAI participants, the potential role of body fat distribution, and the mediation effects of vascular brain injury (Native Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center for Minority Aging Research – Research Education Center (NIA)).
For more information please see Anna’s CV.
Emilio Zagheni is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and Affiliate Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Previously, he served as Training Director of CSDE. He received his Ph.D. in Demography (2010) and M.A. in Statistics (2008) from U.C. Berkeley. Zagheni is best known for his work on combining digital trace data and traditional sources to track and understand migrations and to advance population science. In 2016 he received the Trailblazer Award for Demographic Analysis from the European Association for Population Studies for his role in developing the field of Digital and Computational Demography. Currently, he is a core leader of the training program Population, Health and Data Science in partnership with CSDE and other leading institutions at the forefront of demographic research
Hendrik Wolff is Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is co-editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and on the editorial council of the new journal, Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE).
· He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agricultural engineering from the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn respectively. He received a second master and a PhD in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, as well as a grant from the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). He was a visiting professor at Resources for the Future, as well as at LMU Munich, University of Cologne and at IZA, Bonn.
· Hendrik’s main research is in environmental economics, working at the intersection of transportation, air pollution, energy and health. This includes the economic causes and consequences of air pollution; the ”value of time;” the impact of energy conservation policies on electricity consumption; cost benefit analysis of the clean air act and its effects on health; the interactions between climate, local prices, wages and “quality of life; and the economics of Daylight Saving Time. He also developed new econometric estimators for large supply and demand systems that are used in agriculture and energy. He has conducted research projects in Ecuador, Germany, Mexico, Australia, Bangladesh, Ghana, England, Chile and the United States. Hendrik is a Faculty Affiliate of the UW Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, an IZA Research Fellow, and a CESIfo Research Network Affiliate.
· Hendrik’s work has impact on both academia and policy. He won the 2009 Ralph C d’Arge and Allen V. Kneese Award for Outstanding Publication, which is awarded annually for the Best Paper in Environmental and Resource Economics. His research has led to important policy changes by the United Nations and the World Bank on the measurement of indices (the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Ease of Doing Business Index). His work is discussed on television (e.g., ABC News) and international media (e.g., The Economist, The Wall Street Journal). He has successfully obtained external funding from organizations such as the NSF, as well as CSSS and the Royalty Research Fund. In addition, he has been the chair for six PhD students and has trained many Honors students, many of whom have won multiple awards. The job placements of Hendrik’s students are detailed in his CV. He has also consulted for the U.S. Department of Energy and for the President of the World Bank on important policy issues related to his research.
Suzanne Withers is a spatial demographer/population geographer whose research applies spatial demographic analysis and geographic information science to investigate spatial mobility over the life course. Specifically, over the past few years she has investigated the intersection of family dynamics, housing, labor market transitions and geographic mobility at various scales ranging from local to national. Much of this research uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to link household dynamics with spatial mobility longitudinally. This body of research has established considerable demographic variation in housing cost adjustments associated with family migration thereby contributing to our understanding of the geographic variation in the migration behavior of dual-earner households. There is clear evidence that spatial differentials in the cost of living, particularly when measured by the ratio of housing costs to income, contribute significantly to our understanding of specific origin-destination migration flows across the United States. This research also assessed the synchronicity of fertility events, labor force participation, and the scales of mobility ranging from residential mobility to long-distance migration. Another part of this research interrogated the goodness of fit between moving intentions and mobility events, longitudinally. Her other area of research falls within the general field of housing demography. She studies the intergenerational aspects of housing wealth, home ownership, and location. Understanding the dynamic relative location of parents and their adult children and grandchildren contributes to our understanding of the geography of care and the geodemographics of aging. Her work has established significant differences in the scale of spatial relations among the generations between the European and the American context. While considerable research has addressed these questions in Europe, little attention has been given to these issues in the United States. Her work has been published in Demographic Research, Population, Space and Place, Urban Geography, Geographical Analysis, Environment and Planning A, and the UNESCO-EOLSS volume Demography (English and Chinese). Withers has keen interest in methods of spatial demography. In 2010 she was a visiting scholar at The School of Sociology and Population Studies, Renmin University of China where she trained their students in spatial demography using geographic information science.
Nathalie Williams’ research primarily focuses on migration patterns, during periods of armed conflict, natural disasters and climate change, and social change in general. A key aspect of this work is the fact that even during periods of intense conflict or drastic environmental change, many, if not most, people do not migrate. This is contrary to what is generally assumed and is poorly addressed in the literature. Williams’ work seeks to develop theoretical and empirical understandings of why some people migrate and many do not. In addition to migration, she has also published work examining marriage and fertility patterns during conflict. Incorporating all these demographic patterns during periods of disasters, Williams is now working on two projects that use agent-based models to investigate the macro-level population trends that can result from these micro-level behavioral changes during the recent armed conflict in Nepal and during climatic disasters in Northeast Thailand. Other recent work addresses values and beliefs, how they influence the likelihood of migration and destination choice to different world regions, and how they change through the process of migration. Because migration and conflict are inherently difficult subjects about which to collect data and are also difficult to measure, Williams is also involved in developing new data collection strategies and conceptualization methods. For example, she is working with a team that has successfully collected panel data from a representative sample of Nepali migrants who are currently living in more than 100 countries around the world. Her work is primarily based in Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Persian Gulf. She has worked extensively with the Chitwan Valley Family Study from Nepal and continues to be involved in new data collection projects at that location. She has published in Demography, Social Science Research, Population Studies, International Migration, Journal of Official Statistics, Research on Aging, and AIDS Care.
Marcia Weaver, PhD, is a Research Professor of Health Metrics Sciences and Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. She specializes in cost-effectiveness analysis and has published 82 peer-reviewed articles. At the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, she is leading the research team on cost-effectiveness analyses of interventions to reduce the burden of disease.
Dr. Weaver was Principal Investigator for the Integrated Infectious Disease Capacity Building Evaluation (IDCAP), which was awarded to Accordia Global Health Foundation by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. IDCAP was a cluster randomized trial implemented by the Infectious Diseases Institute in Uganda to estimate the cost-effectiveness of two methods for building capacity for the prevention and treatment of HIV, malaria, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. In the United States, she has published on cost-effectiveness of interventions for people with HIV and chronic mental illness and substance abuse as part of the HIV/AIDS Treatment Adherence, Health Outcomes, and Cost Study, and on a joint campaign to promote influenza and pneumococcal vaccines.
Dr. Weaver also has extensive experience with evaluating the effects of clinical training programs in Botswana, Indonesia, Namibia, South Africa, Thailand, and the Caribbean region. She is proficient with a broad range of methods for measuring the quality of health care and outcomes, such as patient exit interviews, patient service utilization interviews, Medical Outcomes Study short form (SF)-36, observation of clinical practice, standardized patients, facility records and health management information system, clinical vignettes (sometimes referred to as case scenarios), and population-based surveys of mortality among children under 5 years.
Dr. Weaver holds a PhD in economics and an MA in Public Policy from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the UW faculty, Professor Weaver served as a long-term advisor on health system reform to ministries of health in Niger and Central African Republic.
Haidong Wang’s research interests are formal demographic methods, specifically mortality estimation and forecasting, as well as population health. Haidong worked on smoking and mortality in the United States; mortality forecasting methods; intergenerational transfer and its effect on the health of the elderly; and the interaction between physical activities and mental health status of the elderly in the United States. Haidong’s recent research has been focused on formal demographic methods on mortality estimation. He has worked on the estimations of child and adult mortality for the Global Burden of Diseases 2010 project, results of which have been published in three separate articles in Lancet in the past two years. Haidong has also been working on developing a new model life table system. The new model utilizes more recent empirical life tables and especially those affected by HIV/AIDS epidemic. The availability of these life tables enables me to integrate the estimation of the impacts of HIV/AIDS on the age pattern of mortality into the new model life table system. The manuscript of this project is currently under review.
Karina Walters researches American Indian and Alaska Native health, mental health, alcohol and substance abuse, and other wellness areas. She also studies multicultural social work practice identity as well as enculturation and cultural factors that buffer the effect of historical trauma, discrimination, and other forms of trauma and violence on indigenous wellness outcomes.
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.
Jacob Vigdor is a Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. He has maintained a program of active research in subjects related to population studies–spanning economics, education, immigration and ethnicity, political economy, and race and inequality–since receiving graduate training at Harvard 1994-1999. His program of research has resulted in widely-cited peer-reviewed articles on residential segregation, immigration, and educational disparities across demographic groups. Vigdor’s 2010 book manuscript on immigration (From Immigrants to Americans) received the IPUMS research award from the Minnesota Population Center. While on the faculty at Duke University (1999-2014), he was a faculty affiliate of the Duke Population Research Institute and served as the director of Duke’s PhD program in public policy for four years. As director of the Seattle Minimum Wage Study he is leading a multi-disciplinary, multi-method effort to infer the impact of the City’s minimum wage ordinance on population-level labor market indicators and household well-being.