Martina Morris is a Professor Emeritus of sociology and statistics at the University of Washington. Over the past three years, she has worked on three longstanding research interests: the demographic epidemiology of HIV, trends in earnings inequality, and innovative statistical methodology for demographic research.
Morris’ HIV related research is now internationally recognized. She was one of the pioneers in the field of network epidemiology, and her recent research remains at the forefront of the field. In a series of recent papers, she has documented the importance of concurrent partnerships in amplifying the transmission dynamics of HIV, quantified the impact of date measurement error in survey estimates of concurrency, and used microsimulation to estimate the impact of concurrency on HIV transmission in Uganda. Morris specializes in the development of statistical methodology for estimating epidemiologically critical network parameters from “local network” study designs. Local network studies use traditional sample survey techniques, enrolling randomly selected respondents, and asking them to report on their partner’s attributes and behaviors. This approach is much less expensive and intrusive than other network study designs that require eliciting, tracing, and enrolling partners. Morris organized an international conference on demographic network survey design in February 2000, sponsored by the IUSSP.
Morris’ work on inequality is also well recognized. She and her colleagues have just completed a five-year project comparing long-term economic mobility for white men before and after the economic restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s. Using the two cohorts of the NLS, they are the first to have documented that the growing inequality in cross-sectional earnings distributions is being driven by a growing segregation of wage profiles, and a greater “stickiness” in low-wage careers. Their findings are contained in the recently published book Divergent Paths (2001). This project also resulted in a number of careful detailed analyses that challenged conventional wisdom regarding trends in job instability, the quality of the NLS data, and the relative size of transient and permanent variation in age-earnings profiles.
In the course of this substantive research, Morris has also developed new statistical methodology in a number of areas. She has developed extensions to generalized linear models for local network analysis and innovative epidemiologically relevant network summary measures. With Mark Handcock, she has developed a new statistical framework for distributional comparison, published as a book, Relative Distribution Methods in the Social Sciences (1999).
Ali Modarres specializes in urban planning and public policy with a focus on the socio-spatial dynamics of American cities. Since the late 1980s, his research has centered on issues related to access for immigrants and minority communities in the U.S. A significant level of this research has relied on in-depth analysis of macro and micro geographies of poverty, demographic shifts, and the changing structure of urban services, including transportation, employment geography, and housing.
He is the co-Editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and the City.
Tyler McCormick’s research has been devoted to two themes: how to develop statistical methods to learn about social network structure using sampled or partially observed network data; and how to leverage social structure in social networks to access populations that are excluded from the sampling frame of most surveys (the homeless, or individuals living with HIV, for example). McCormick’s work on statistical methods have focused primarily on “How many X’s do you know?’’ data. In such data, respondents report the number of ties they have with members of a particular population, X. These data require no special sampling mechanism and are easily incorporated into standard surveys. McCormick has used these data to produce estimates of features of respondents’ local networks and of global network properties. He has published papers on estimating respondents’ degrees, the population degree distribution, and levels of overdispersion (excess variation in the data due to social structure). McCormick’s most recent work in this area is a new class of statistical models based on latent space models proposed in the complete network literature. These models estimate relative homogeneity between groups in the population and variation in the propensity for interaction between respondents and group members. McCormick has also worked extensively on data collection issues for these data, suggesting strategies for more efficient survey design and proposing statistical adjustments for common forms of respondent error. McCormick’s work on hard-to-reach populations proposes network-based estimates for the demographic profiles of these populations. This project also let to survey design recommendations for future data collection. He has published on these topics in the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the American Journal of Sociology.
Jonathan Mayer’s research over the past decade has been in several directions, most broadly in the area of the ecology of human disease: how biology, environment, and society interact to produce states of health and disease. Epidemiology, ecology, and spatial analysis of infectious diseases, especially pertaining to developing countries; the epidemiology of pain; urban slum health in developing countries; tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa; host-environment interaction in infectious disease pathogenesis; water, sanitation, and infectious disease; and global environmental change and health, beginning with his membership on the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Sciences joint Committee on Climate, Ecosystem Change, Infectious Diseases, and Human Health, which was tasked with ascertaining the state of knowledge on the relations between climate variability and infectious diseases. He has served on numerous NAS and NIH panels and committees, including the NAS Standing Committee on the Geographical Sciences; and the Committee on Research Priorities in the Earth Sciences and Public Health; and a committee that is joint between NIH and the Association of American Geographers dealing with the development of a cross-institute initiative on developing a GIScience infrastructure at NIH.
Mayer has published in journals including JAMA; Spine; Anesthesiology; Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Infectious Diseases; Social Science and Medicine; and Progress in Human Geography; and the Clinical Journal of Pain. He has published numerous book chapters on the health effects of migration; health effects of natural disasters; and “epidemiologic geography,” which is a term that he coined to reflect the current state of his field in a recent publication.
Currently, Mayer is working on several COVID-19 projects, as well as various projects involving the epidemiology of pain and pain treatment.
Ross L. Matsueda’s research interests include criminology, juvenile delinquency, deviance, teen childbearing, statistics, methods, and social psychology. He has been involved with two major research projects over the last decade. The first, funded by NIH and in collaboration with Erosheva, Social Work, Kreager, Penn State, and Telesca, UCLA, examines life course trajectories of substance use and crime. On the methodological side, after showing tha latent class mixture models of trajectories fit individual trajectories poorly, they develop an alternative model that assumes a single age-crime curve, and then estimates departures from that curve using individual-specific parameters of phase (to model onset and desistance) and amplitude (to model level of offending). They model the age crime curve using B-splines, and factor out individual-specific temporal misalignment and amplitude via Bayesian curve registration methods. The initial paper in this series received a revise and resubmit at the JASA. On the substantive side, Matsueda is examining the effects of life course transitions, such as the transition to parenthood, marriage, college, and employment, on substance use and crime. An initial paper using fixed-effects models found support for the hypothesis, identified in ethnographic research, that that within disadvantaged neighborhoods, motherhood can result in a positive transformation of previously delinquent and chaotic lives. The next step will be to examine the effects of fatherhood, which appear to operate very differently from motherhood, and examine whether these results hold for the nation as a whole, or only a disadvantaged subgroup, as suggested by ethnographic studies. Matsueda is also examining the long-term effects (on criminality and socioeconomic outcomes) of parenting during childhood and working during adolescence. A second project, funded by NSF, examines the spatial distribution of crime and violence across Seattle neighborhoods. This project tests social capital and collective efficacy theories using data collected on 5,000 Seattle residents within 123 census tracts.
Melissa Martinson’s research interests are broadly focused on inequities in health and wellbeing throughout the life span in the United States and internationally. Much of her work examines health disparities by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, with a particular focus on children. Her current research also looks at the health and wellbeing of immigrants and their children and how factors such as acculturation and socioeconomic status influence health after arrival.
Mark Long is the Dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Long’s research over the past decade has mostly been devoted to understanding the process by which student’s transition between high school and college, how public policies affect educational attainment, and the effects of education on adult outcomes. In the last decade he has published on these topics in the following journals: Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Econometrics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Public Administration Review, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Economics of Education Review, Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Social Science Research, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy. Recently, with funding provided by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), Long has been working with colleagues Dylan Conger (George Washington University) and Patrice Iatarola to explain what motivates high schools to offer rigorous courses, what explains racial, poverty, and gender gaps in coursetaking, and what gaps in coursetaking mean for future educational attainment. Additionally, with funding from the Smith Richardson foundation, Long has been working on understanding why boys are less likely to attend college and less likely to graduate if they do attend.
Taryn Lindhorst’s research over the past decade has focused on policy implementation processes and health, particularly the effects of victimization for vulnerable women and sexual minorities. She has authored publications that have appeared in American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Violence against Women, Journal of Interpersonal Violence and Journal of Orthopsychiatry. She has co-authored a book with CSDE affiliate Gunnar Almgren entitled The Safety Net Health Care System: Practice at the Margins which will be published in Fall 2011. This book is designed to assist doctors, nurses, social workers and others who work in hospitals and health clinics with a high proportion of impoverished patients to understand the special history and needs of clients in these institutions. In 2010 and 2011, she and Jeffrey Edleson (Co-PI, NIJ) were invited to present their research on policy issues related to international child custody and domestic violence at the U.S. Department of Justice and to the Hague Bureau on Private International Law at The Hague, The Netherlands. Current Projects: Dr. Lindhorst is completing a manuscript on policy issues related to international child abduction with her co-PI; this book is under contract with Northeastern Press. Currently, Lindhorst is involved in two data collection processes – through an NINR grant, she is collecting ethnographic data as part of an intervention team at a local Children’s Hospital to understand how clinicians implement policies and practices related to palliative and end-of-life care in an intensive care setting. Her second project consists of interviews with key Washington state stakeholders involved in the implementation of research-based findings related to Adverse Childhood Experiences (funded by William T. Grant Foundation, David Takeuchi and Jerry Hertling, CSDE affiliates, Co-PI’s).
William Lavely’s research interests include fertility, Chinese society, marriage and the family, household structure, and family change in context. He has written on Chinese historical demography, rising sex ratios, and Chinese censuses. His historical work, which concerns the proximate determinants of China prior to demographic transition, highlights the role of breastfeeding duration and coital frequency in explaining low levels of marital fertility in late imperial China as compared to early modern Europe, and argues, against the conventional wisdom, that China’s historical fertility regime was fairly typical of pre-transition agrarian societies. With Cai Yong, a former CSDE Fellow now at University of North Carolina Population Center, Lavely described and analyzed spatial variation in child sex ratios using 2000 Chinese census data at the county level and GIS techniques. Lavely recently completed a chapter on social values and lifestyles in East Asia for a collection entitled Public Health in East Asia (forthcoming, UC Press).
Melissa Knox’s research focuses on the economic and health impacts of increased access to health care services and health-promoting technologies, including pharmaceuticals. She is also interested in the role that health and health care access play in the structure and function of the family, especially with regards to fertility and childhood investment decisions. Recently, she has investigated the impacts of Mexico’s universal health insurance program, Seguro Popular, on health, education, and labor market participation. She is also currently working on a model of the impact of sex ratio imbalances on the marriage market in China.