Archives: Affiliates

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.

Katherine Stovel’s research over the past decade has brought a variety of techniques for the analysis of temporal and social network data to the study of population-related processes including migration, social networks, career structures, and adolescent health. She has published on these topics in the American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Methods and Research, the American Journal of Public Health, Social Forces, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, the Annual Review of Political Science, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While in graduate school, Stovel was involved in the early design and initial data collection of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), and has used these data in her subsequent research. Notably, she is a co-author of “Chains of Affection,” an award winning paper on the structure of adolescent sexual networks (Bearman, Moody and Stovel 2004). More recently, she has written on the long-term effects of early condom use on subsequent sexual behavior, and has developed simulation methods to explore the consequences of social network structure on labor market processes.

K. Warner Schaie’s research over the past half century has been devoted to studying cognitive development over the adult lifespan, specifically the developmental concomitants of behavioral rigidity. In this context, he has developed methodologies to differentiate between individuals’ age differences (cohort effects) from within individuals’ (maturational) age changes. He has also investigated the developmental influences, as well as the biological and environmental influences that affect adult intelligence. Much of this work has been done in the context of the Seattle Longitudinal Study {SLS) which has studied the cognitive aging of over 5000 individuals since 1956. With his co-investigator Dr. Sherry Williis, Schaie has also investigated cognitive intervention to slowing behavioral aging and most recently has used neuroi-maging approaches to study brain-behavior interrelationships. Schaie has extended his study into the investigation of inter-generational differences and trajectories in adult cognition, by studying children, grandchildren and siblings of the original SLS participants. In addition to over 300 papers and/or book chapters in the scientific he has also published several scientific monographs on the findings of his studies. The second revised edition of Developmental Influences: The Seattle Longitudinal Study is now in press to be published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The Seattle Longitudinal Study maintains a website with a public access data set and study publications in pdf at www.uwpsychiatry.org.

Elaina Rose is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on labor economics, economics of the family, and the economics of gender. Her earlier work examined the effect of economic conditions on excess female mortality in India. She has written several papers on the effect of child gender on numerous aspects of household behavior in both India and the United States. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have funded her research on the relationship between parenthood and labor market outcomes and on shifts in marriage patterns in recent decades. Her work on family economics has been widely cited in major international media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Independent, Le Figaro and CNN, and she has been interviewed by BBC England, Scotland, Wales, and World Service. Her current research interests include the relationship between family background and military service and the effect of child health on subsequent fertility. She teaches Labor Economics, Economics of Gender and Econometrics. Dr. Rose is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Women Studies and an affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences and the South Asia Center. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993.