This week we are excited to hear from CSDE External Affiliate and Associate Professor in the Department Criminal Justice & Criminology at Georgia State University, Callie Burt! Dr. Burt’s presentation, “Scrutinizing the Science of Sociogenomics,” will take a deep-dive into the methodology of genomic-wide association studies and polygenic scores and their employment in social science.

You can register for the seminar HERE, and check out all the upcoming topics and register for future seminars on our website.

After the seminar, we will facilitate and graduate student discussion with Dr. Burt. Students will have the opportunity to discuss research collaborations, professional development, academic publishing, and interdisciplinary research, among other topics.

This seminar is co-sponsored with the Population Health Initiative.

Several CSDE affiliates have received Population Health Initiative Pilot Grant Funding.  In the Tier 1 category the following affiliates were part of teams that received funding: Jane Simoni and colleagues for a project seeking to extend mHealth psychological interventions in China; Marieka Klawitter and colleagues for a project seeking to understand risk taking behavior and cryptocurrency trading among young adults; and, Melanie Martin, Zack Almquist, Amy Hagopian and colleagues for a project investing sleep health among the homeless.  In the Tier 2 category the following affiliates were part of teams that received funding: Nicole Errett, Rebecca Walter, and colleagues for a project assessing public housing preparedness for disasters; Amy Hagopian, Bo Zhao, Zack Almquist, Adrian Dobra and colleagues for a project on innovating methods for better enumeration of the homeless people; Edmund Seto and colleagues on human health associated with exposure to airplane noise pollution; and Melissa Martinson, Rebecca Rebbe and colleagues for a project to build population data about child maltreatment from administrative records.

CSDE Affiliate and Executive Committee Member Jon Wakefield is cited in New York Times reporting that broke over the weekend. The article investigates the production and delays in the World Health Organization’s effort to calculate the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic. Wakefield, who played a key role in building the model used for these estimates, is quoted highlighting the rigorous sensitivity tests the team has undertaken to ensure the accuracy of estimates.