Mark your calendars for March 11th, 2022 at 12:30 PM for CSDE’s Fall 2020 Lightning Talks and Poster Session. Six graduate students from the Health Metrics Sciences, Health Systems & Population Health, Statistics, and Sociology Departments are eager to present their research discuss their work with you during poster presentations. The session will take place on Zoom — you can register for the seminar HERE. You are sure to learn something new from the these very interesting presentations, which will cover a wide range of key topics in population science.

This week CSDE will host Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies and CSDE Affiliate Oliver Rollins. Focusing on neuroimaging research on antisocial behavior, this talk will outline the possibilities and pitfalls of the construct he calls the “violent brain”—a new brain type focused on identifying potential criminals.

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

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

CSDE affiliate Alexes Harris has received an award from Arnold Ventures, partnering with Dr. Leslie Paik, University of Arizona; Dr. Sarah Shannon, University of Georgia, and Dr. Christopher Uggen at the University of Minnesota.

Building on the success of the Multi-State Monetary Sanctions study, Dr. Harris and her team will conduct four complementary research projects that aim to 1) capture and understand the broad scope and impact of monetary sanctions/legal financial obligations (“LFOs”) and 2) investigate alternative legal system reforms (collectively, the “Study”).

To accomplish these objectives, the proposed project will include four complementary but independent projects: assessments of promising LFO reforms; understanding the relationship between LFOs and child support debt; examining the relationship between LFOs and place; and understanding victims’ experiences with restitution and public support for restitution reform. Across these four projects, the team will collect a broad set of interview, individual-level court, and policy practice data to illustrate and understand the precarious nature of the lives of people who owe monetary sanctions and the systems that manage them. This includes individual-level data to examine the types of debt that people owe (e.g., eviction, child support, education, DMV or driver’s license data). These data will allow for the examination of the spatial concentration and patterning of monetary sanctions (e.g., are there certain cities, communities that shoulder a comparatively heavier burden of sentence amounts, or debt?). The team will analyze the variation between municipalities and counties, and urban, rural, and suburban reliance on monetary sanctions (e.g., how much revenue is generated by monetary sanctions, how this differs across spaces). The research team will also seek to better understand the types of statutory changes and local/state policy interventions that have recently occurred and to examine their outcomes. The team seeks to examine the consequences of legal and policy changes for legal systems and individuals (defendants, their families, and victims) and to explore the types of policy alternatives to monetary sanctions and the extent to which they would receive public support.

Latinx gay, bisexual, and other sexual minority men (SMM) are disproportionately affected by HIV in the United States, and also experience inequitable access to health services. In a recent explore study, available in pre-print HERE, CSDE Affiliate Jane Lee and several co-authors explore the potential for culturally-tailored social media content to increase HIV testing and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake.