Danuta Kasprzyk is a Research Professor at the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing. She spent the first six years of her career on the faculty at the University of Washington, in the Department of Community Health Care Systems, in the School of Nursing. She then moved to Battelle and was a research scientist for over 20 years in the Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation. Her research interests include psychology, public health, preventive and behavioral medicine, health psychology, evaluation of health education, and prevention programs. The primary driver in her research has been to determine what motivates behavior, so programs can be built to encourage healthy behaviors, whether via primary or secondary prevention. She co-developed the Integrated Behavioral Model and has used it extensively to predict and change behavior. Kasprzyk has had research experience in many communities in the US as well as in Africa. She has also been Principal Investigator on two community-based intervention trials (one focused on HIV prevention, and one on building resilience among families living with HIV) and a co-investigator on two male circumcision studies in Zimbabwe, one determining the factors affecting uptake, and one (currently being conducted) determining whether risk compensation occurs among men who get circumcised.
Donna Johnson’s research at the UW has been devoted to bringing the rigors of academic thinking to the practice of public health nutrition. Her research interests include pediatric nutrition, efficacy of public health nutrition interventions, and public health approaches to obesity, and she seeks to advance understandings about the process of public health practice in the core functions of assessment, assurance, and policy development. In the past decade she has published results of studies on the impact of nutrition and physical activity policies in school and child care settings, collaborative and community-based processes to assure access to healthy foods, and interventions to assure that families can provide health enhancing environments for their children. Publications have appeared in Public Health Nutrition, Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Preventing Chronic Disease, and the American Journal of Health Promotion. She has several projects underway at the moment that build on methods and understandings that she and her team have developed about the process of nutrition policy development and community-based research. These include studies of the population health impacts of nutrition labeling, rural food access, access to drinking water in schools, and adoption of nutritional quality guidelines in governmental purchasing.
Darryl Holman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology (Biocultural program), and an affiliate of CSDE and the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences. His research lies at the intersection of biological anthropology and population studies, integrating traditional microdemographic methods with biomarker and statistical models of biocultural processes (Holman 2000b). His research on age-specific total fecundability and total fetal loss in Bangladeshi women (Holman et al. 1998, 2000; Holman and Wood in press) establish that total fecundability is constant across most of the reproductive lifespan, and that the observed age-related decline in apparent fecundability results from an increase in early pregnancy loss. Holman developed a biostatistical model of follicular depletion, which has been used for understanding female reproductive senescence (O’Connor et al. 1998; Holman et al. in press a), the biology of the menopause, the perimenopausal transition (O’Connor et al. 2001a), and the evolution of reproductive senescence (Wood et al. in press b). Holman has been studying aspects of child health in non-industrial settings, including determinants of the timing to breastfeeding (Holman and Grimes 2001) and the growth and development of children (Holman and Jones 1998; Konigsberg and Holman 1999). His research in historical demography and paleodemography is aimed at understanding health and mortality in past populations. He has developed new statistical methods for estimating age-at-death distributions from imperfect age indicators (Holman et al. in press b; Konigsberg and Holman 1999), and recovering population growth rates from paleodemographic observations (Wood et al. in press a).
Charles Hirschman’s current research priorities focus on immigration to the United States, race and ethnic disparities in educational attainment, and the formation of race and ethnic identities. He also studies demographic change in Southeast Asia, fertility and the family, and ethnic stratification. Over the last decade, his research has been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Over the last decade, his research has been published in Population and Development Review, Demography, Sociological Methodology, Social Science Research, Sociology of Education, Research on Social Stratification and Mobility, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Population Studies, and International Migration Review. He was the lead editor of the authoritative Handbook of International Migration and is a frequent contributor to major encyclopedia in demography, sociology, and the social sciences. He currently directs the University of Washington-Beyond High School (UW-BHS) project, a longitudinal study of educational attainment and the early life course of young adults. The UW-BHS project interviewed almost 10,000 high school seniors in 12 high schools in three school districts in Western Washington from 2000 to 2005. The UW-BHS sample was followed one year after high school graduation with a 90% re-interview rate. A pilot ten-year follow-up survey of the Class of 2000 was recently completed with a completion rate of 75%. The UW-BHS data have been analyzed by Hirschman and collaborators to addressed two major research questions: What accounts for the persistence of race and ethnic disparities in college enrollment and college graduation?; How to conceptualize and measure the complexity or responses to questions about race and ethnic identities. On the latter question, Hirschman and Tony Perez have suggested that a new survey question on “Primary Race or Ethnicity” can help to resolve much of the uncertainty created by census and survey respondents who write in Some Other Race, and checking multiple races. In recent work, they are examining the relationship between subjective race and ethnic identities (reported by respondents) and “observed race”—the race and ethnic assignments of the same persons made by anonymous coders of pictures of the survey respondents.
Heather Hill is a Professor in the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. She has a BA (political science) from UW, a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University. Her research examines how public and workplace policies influence family economic circumstances and child well-being and development in low-income families. Hill conducts experimental, quasi-experimental and non-experimental research using both quantitative and qualitative data. Her training and research orientation are fundamentally multidisciplinary and population-focused. Her work has been published in top journals, including the Journal of Public Policy and Management, Demography, Work and Occupations, the American Journal of Epidemiology, and the Journal of Health Economics. At CSDE, Hill serves on the Executive Committee and as chair of the primary research area on the Wellbeing of Households and Families. She also serves on the Executive Council of the University of Washington’s Public Health Initiative.
Jerald Herting’s research over the past two decades has primarily focused on adolescent health and mental health behaviors evaluating health promotion intervention programs and exploring the role of social/environmental context on these health and related behaviors, both at the individual and aggregate level. This work has also included examining the successful life course transition from adolescence to young adulthood. Recently Herting has also initiated projects directed at studying healthy aging and frailty in the aged population. In the last decade he has published on adolescent health behaviors in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Journal of Research on Adolescence, Biodemography and Social Biology, American Journal of Health Behavior, among others. His recent work on healthy aging has appeared in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society and the Journal of Physical Activity and Health. Herting has a set of NIH funded collaborative projects recently completed and currently underway. One current study is a longitudinal study examining the development of depression across early to late adolescence, with a focus on the interplay of other adolescent physical changes, as well as changes in school/social settings; this work is in collaboration with colleagues at the UW’s Schools of Medicine and Public Health. A second set of studies explored the long-term follow-up of a stratified sample of high-risk and non-risk youth from adolescence (aged 13-17) to young adulthood (aged 25-29) with particular emphasis on mental health and substance use, but included exploring adult transitions to independent housing, union formation, and child-bearing. Work has pointed to statistical classes of adolescents who experience persistent poor mental health, while subsets experience desistence. The role of early trauma and early transition to adult statuses play a negative role in successful transitions to additional schooling, consistent employment, and additional health problems. As part of Herting’s new research direction on healthy aging, he has been involved in a set of work looking the health of older women. This work includes colleagues in the UW’s School of Nursing looking at well-being and chronic disease and includes a number of proposal’s using the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) national database; one funded project specific addresses health during the post-reproductive transition.
Rachel Heath’s research focuses on the expansion of job opportunities in developing countries: how workers get access to these jobs and the consequences of these new opportunities for the lives of current and potential future workers. Since these jobs are often higher-paying and more reliable than jobs previously available to women in particular, they fundamentally change the value of work (relative to marriage and childbearing) and women’s bargaining power relative to their husbands and other family members.
Alexes Harris, Ph.D., is the Presidential Term Professor and Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Dr. Harris’ work has spanned the criminal justice system, including juvenile justice, case processing outcomes, and monetary sanctions. Her research is fundamentally centered on issues of inequality, poverty and race in the United States’ systems of justice. Her book, A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as a Punishment for the Poor details the ways in which sentenced fines and fees often put an undue burden on disadvantaged populations and place them under even greater supervision of the criminal justice system. The book has received widespread media coverage, including by The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Nation, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Her research has been published in peer reviewed journals such as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Ethnography, Crime and Public Policy, and Law and Society Review. Her current project extends this line of research in eight states with funding from Arnold Ventures.
Dr. Harris’ research areas include:
- Qualitative research methods
- Criminal justice system processing
- Multi-state multi-method data collection
Dr. Guttmannova is interested in the prevention of child and adolescent substance use and behavior problems, the risk and protective framework in the etiology of substance use, and the role of context including social policy, culture, immigration, and poverty in healthy development across the life course.