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Societal Impacts Interviews Four Associate Editors

Societal Impacts interviewed their four Associate Editors to share more about their research background and motivations to join the journal’s editorial team.  Societal Impacts is an open access, peer-reviewed journal, which publishes brief articles that describe the societal impacts of research projects. The journal serves as a platform for papers demonstrating steps towards resolving major challenges, like climate change and inequality, and delivering on global initiatives, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Associate Editors, who each bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to enrich the review process, are:

  • Alexander Gilder  (University of Reading, UK)
  • Tracey O’Connor (Munster Technological University, Ireland)
  • Hua Pang (Tianjin University, China)
  • Richard Reibstein (Boston University, USA)

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Technology Program (Rolling)

Organization: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Technology Program
Award amount: Undisclosed; Most projects funded between 50K to 600K
Sponsor deadline: Rolling deadline.
Description: The Foundation’s Technology grantmaking aims to leverage advances in technology to benefit the research community. This includes three sub programs: (1) Exploratory Grantmaking in Technology; (2) Open Source in Science; and (3) Scientific Collaboration.  The RFP can be found here. Interested grantseekers should email a letter of inquiry of no more than two pages to technology@sloan.org. Contact UW College of Arts & Sciences Corporate & Foundations Relations if you are interested in applying or have questions.
The fast pace of technological change and broader investment of resources by industry drive the architecture of the Foundation’s Technology grantmaking, which aims to leverage advances in technology to benefit the research community. The program includes exploratory grantmaking designed to quickly surface, develop, and evaluate emerging technologies, as well as subprograms that are structured to develop specific opportunities through sustained grantmaking that engages technical, community, and institutional practices. A new focus area is AI as a tool or collaborator. The foundation is interested in ideas to help clarify where AI-as-tool ends, where AI-as-collaborator might responsibly begin, and what technical, institutional, or design work is needed to bridge that gap for the scientific enterprise.
Exploratory Grantmaking in Technology
Exploratory grantmaking is intended to bring community needs and priorities into sharper focus and allow the Foundation to determine whether there is a clear strategy and potential impact in a specific area. Supported activities may include workshops and other expert convenings, early technology development and prototyping, landscape analyses, development of protocols and standards, initial research on and engagement with potential user communities, and demonstration or other proof-of-concept projects. Ideal focus areas lie at the intersection of research and technology, are sufficiently limited that the Foundation could make an impact with its available resources, and involve issues for which public or private funding is scarce or unavailable.  Focus areas: AI in Science & Automation in Science.
Open Source in Science
Once viewed as primarily a licensing strategy, open source has become increasingly established as a set of practices that facilitate distributed collaboration. To fully realize the potential of innovations like data science, computational modeling, novel instrumentation, and machine learning, this program aims to adapt and extend best practices in open source into academic technology development while recognizing the unique workflows and incentives of scientific research. Rather than funding individual open source development projects, grants in this area focus mainly on tooling, institutions, economic models, and incentives around the production, maintenance, and adoption of research software, hardware, models, and other related research outputs. Focus areas: Institutional Support for Open Source, Publication & Archiving, and Roles & Career Paths.
Scientific Collaboration
Technology platforms can enable geographically dispersed collaboration in configurations that mix remote and in-person, live and asynchronous, immersive, and even human and nonhuman interaction. Given the climate, public health, and equity issues raised by needing to meet in-person, this program explores the ways that technology can enable or inhibit rich interactions at different scales across distance, time zones, and languages. Focus areas: The Future of Conferences & Workshops, Group Dynamics in Science, & Human-AI Collaboration.
Eligibility:
Faculty & PIs

CSSCR Workshop Offerings Winter Quarter 2026

The Center for Social Science Computation and Research (CSSCR) is offering seven workshops during Winter 2026 Quarter, open to all members of the UW community, whether student, faculty or staff.  See a full list with workshop descriptions and registration links here. 

Geospatial Analysis in Python

  • Date:  Monday, February 2, 2026
  • Time: 2:00pm – 3:20pm

Introduction to Thematic Analysis in Atlas.ti

  • Date:  Thursday, February 5, 2026
  • Time: 3:00pm – 4:20pm

Introduction to STATA 13

  • Date:  Friday, February 6, 2026
  • Time: 9:00am – 10:20am

Data Wrangling in R

  • Date:  Friday, February 6, 2026
  • Time: 2:30pm – 3:50pm

Machine Learning Methods for Supervised Single-Label and Multi-Label Classification

  • Date:  Thursday, February 12, 2026
  • Time: 1:00pm – 2:20pm

PAST WORKSHOPS

Introduction to Python

  • Date:  Wednesday, January 21, 2026
  • Time: 10:30am – 11:50am

Efficient R Programming: Working with Many Columns, Functions, and Models

  • Date:  Thursday, January 22, 2026
  • Time: 12:00pm – 1:20pm

FemQuant Launches Spring Seminar Series

FemQuant is a network of researchers whose goal is to explore the use of feminist theory in current quantitive, empirical research across the social sciences, including sociology, economics, demography, social policy, psychology, health and international relations. They are hosting a monthly seminar series via zoom with scholars from around the world. The program of online FemQuant events for the coming term is now available, with FemQuant’s first event of the new year taking place next week on January 14. As always, all FemQuant events are free, online and open to all, but registration is required.

January – Research Seminar – Wednesday 14 January 2026
8-9:00 (EST) / 13-14:00 (GMT) / 14-15:00 (CET) (Check time in your time zone)

Outsider Orbit: Segmentation of Employment Trajectories and Feminisation of Outsiders in South Korea
Dr. Hyojin Seo, King’s College London

This paper investigates the labour market segmentation patterns based on employment trajectories using group-based multi-trajectory modelling on Korean Labor & Income Panel Study data. We find clear evidence of a segmented labour market, where outsiders have distinct employment trajectories from insiders, and women’s overrepresentation in outsider trajectories. Furthermore, outsiders are trapped in an ‘outsider orbit’, indicating a structural barrier that limits women to outsider jobs in Korea.

Hyojin Seo is a gender and labour market researcher, with expertise on gendered precarity and the role of institutions shaping gendered labour market patterns in Europe and East Asia. She is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at King’s College London, having recently been granted a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship to investigate gendered experience of precarity in workers’ long-term career amid digitalisation in the UK and South Korea.

February – Research Seminar – Thursday 12 February 2026
10-11:00 (EST) / 15-16:00 (GMT) / 16-17:00 (CET) (Check time in your time zone)

Deroutinization of Labor and Second Birth in West Germany: The Moderating Role of Childcare
Dr. Honorata Bogusz, University of Warsaw

Further details to be announced soon.

Honorata Bogusz is an empirical economist and demographer employed in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Labour Market and Family Dynamics (LabFam), Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw. Her research interests lie in inequalities related to labor, gender, family, and LGBTQ+ issues.

March – Conversation – Tuesday 3 March 2026
10-11:00 (EST) / 15-16:00 (GMT) / 16-17:00 (CET) (Check time in your time zone)

A Conversation with FemDem: The Feminist Demography Collective

This event is an opportunity to be in conversation with folks from the FemDem collective, hear about their plans, and chat about the future of feminist demographic research.

The Feminist Demography Collective is a group of scholars that seeks to advance the field of demography by critically assessing the historical roots of the field, pushing rigorous research informed by feminist theories, and demanding accountable research practices that are human- and community-centered.

May – Research Seminar

Chae Eun Kim, Cornell University

Further details to be announced soon.

June – Panel – Tuesday 23 June 2026
10 -11:00 (EDT) / 15-16:00 (BST) / 16-17:00 (CEST) (Check in your time zone)

Panel: Navigating the Peer Review Process with Queer/Feminist Quantitative Work Dr. Ridhi Kashyap, Dr. Rin Reczek, & Dr. Wendy Manning

In this panel, we will have a moderated discussion about the peer review processes with three scholars who have insights from perspectives as an editor, author, and reviewer of feminist/queer quantitative work. We will be collecting questions from audience members in the registration form and doing live Q&A during the event.

Ridhi Kashyap is Professor of Demography & Computational Social Science at University of Oxford, Rin Reczek is Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University, and Wendy Manning is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Bowling Green State University.