Using large-scale news media and social media data, CSDE Affiliate Jelani Ince and co-authors from Indiana University show that nationwide Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests occur concurrently with sharp increases in public attention to components of the BLM agenda. The authors also show that attention to BLM and related concepts is not limited to these brief periods of protest but is sustained after protest has ceased, suggesting that protest events incited a change in public awareness of BLM’s vision of social change and the dissemination of antiracist ideas into popular discourse. This research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; you can read the UW News coverage of the article here.

Winter is over and we’re excited to share the SPRING 2022 SEMINAR SERIES line-up of speakers and topics! We’ll be starting the quarter off hearing from Siri Suh of Brandeis University about her research on post-abortion care and reproductive health politics in Senegal. Other speakers will cover topics of poverty among rural children, issues of migration, deportation, health outcomes for minority populations during the pandemic, and much more.

We are offering the seminar in a hybrid model for the spring. In-person attendees: we look forward to seeing you at the Rosling Center (Room 101). Virtual attendees: please register via the Zoom links for each week as listed on our website.

As Winter quarter comes to a close, we want to send out an extra word of thanks to all the winter quarter presenters and participants. Attendees, thanks for your continued virtual presence and consistently high-caliber questions. As always, special thanks to our fearless faculty organizer, Peter Catron!

If you missed any of the seminars from this past quarter or want to re-experience the brilliance of this quarter’s speakers over spring break, the recordings are available on our YouTube channel!

Congratulations to all our poster presenters for their very good work! Extra kudos to CSDE Trainee Maria Vignau Loria & CSDE Fellow Aasli Nur (joint presentation – Sociology) for winning the best poster award during CSDE’s Winter 2022 Lightning Talks & Poster Session. Vignau Loria & Nur’s presentation, titled “The diffusion of scientific knowledge on family planning behavior: when, where, and by whom is research being done?,” included analysis of publication authorship, descriptively breaking down the geographic dispersion of research activity and the demographics of authors. Many thanks to our other speakers, Nicholas Irons (Statistics), Ihsan Kahveci (Sociology), Zoe Pleasure (Health Systems & Population Health), and Maitreyi Sahu (Health Metrics Sciences), our Interim Training Director Jessica Godwin, and our student coordinator Courtney Allen, for another great CSDE Lightning Talks & Poster Session. Finally, we want to thank everyone who attended and, especially, our wonderful CSDE Faculty Affiliates Panel of poster judges: Bettina Shell-Duncan, Julie Brines, Jessica Jones-Smith, and Darryl Holman.

CSDE Affiliates Ruanne Barnabas and Alison Drake have a forthcoming publication with a number of co-authors now available in pre-print on medRxiv. The authors use the Spectrum AIDS Impact Model to simulate the HIV epidemic in key populations in Viet Nam and evaluated five testing scenarios. Their findings suggest annual or biannual HIV and syphilis testing using dual RDTs among key populations can be cost-effective and support countries in reaching global reduction goals for HIV and syphilis.