Archives: Affiliates

Leigh Anderson joined the Evans School faculty in 1997. She previously taught for eight years at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She has also taught or been a visiting researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan, Renmin University of China in Beijing, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. Her primary research interest is in explaining how changes in traditional economic constraints affect individual behavior, but also how formal and informal institutions, intra-household dynamics, and cognitive limitations lead to outcomes different from those predicted by a simple model of utility maximization.

Katie Baird’s research examines the ways in which the U.S.’s educational system results in unequal opportunities for youth based on their socioeconomic background. Recent research has examined the historical foundations of educational governance in the US, placing this within a comparative perspective. This is important because educational reforms that fail to consider institutional features of our educational system can lead to misjudging reasons why it performs so poorly. Some of her research examines some unintended consequences of reform, arguing that they often serve to reinforce rather than undo the features that perpetuate inequality. Dr. Baird has also embarked on several projects investigating the distributional burden of health care financing in the US. More recently she has joined other researchers to investigate the impact that drop boxes have on voting turnout. 

Betty Bekemeier is a public health systems and services researcher with collaborative research underway with public health partners nationwide. Her research is focused on determining the impact of local public health department services and activities on the reduction of health disparities, in order to direct policy and practice in terms of “what works,” “for whom,” and “under what conditions” in local public health practice. She is a founding member of Washington State’s (WA) Public Health Practice-based Research Network (PBRN)—one of 12 state-wide Public Health PBRN research collaboratives made up of state and local public health practice leaders and researchers focused on answering questions of specific significance to practice and bridging the research translation “disconnect” between studies not easily translated to practice and the under-studied research needs of practitioners. She is PI of the Public Health Activities and Services Tracking (PHAST) study—the first national multi-state Public Health PBRN study—and is working with 10 PBRN states to understand the nature of local public health system service variation and change. The RWJF-funded PHAST study has been officially underway since only September 2010, but has already generated 4 additional, separately-funded projects and 2 other pending proposed studies. By working through and with PBRN partners, the PHAST study team has access to and is compiling annual data specific to amounts and types of local public health services provided per health department per county. These types of data have never been previously obtainable and examined and studies estimating the impact of local health department services on population health and other outcomes have, therefore, been very difficult otherwise to conduct. Betty and the PHAST team have developed strong relationships with national practice partners, established operational procedures for a growing relational data base, processed related data documentation and histories, and are conducting preliminary analyses regarding the variation in distribution of maternal/child health services provided by health departments and relative to local “need.” Betty has also published studies she has conducted regarding the associations of types of local public health services with disparities in county-level racial mortality.

Much of Luke Bergmann’s work is in computational social science and human-environment relations. In one larger project, he studies how populations and distant forests, fields, and carbon emissions are interconnected by economic globalization. In another, he studies how human populations, ecosystems, and influenza co-evolve.

Ann Bostrom joined the Evans School faculty in 2007. Her research focuses on risk perception, communication, and management; and environmental policy and decision-making. Bostrom previously served on the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) from 1992-2007, where she served as Associate Dean for Research at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and Professor in the School of Public Policy. Bostrom co-directed the Decision Risk and Management Science Program at the National Science Foundation from 1999-2001. While in this position she organized, participated in, and made presentations at national and international meetings on research and science policy, including but not limited to, the Subcommittee on Natural Disaster Reduction and the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program.

She has authored or contributed to numerous publications, including Risk Communication: A Mental Models Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Risk Assessment, Modeling and Decision Support: Strategic Directions (Berlin: Springer, 2008), and National Research Council, Institute of Medicine, U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, and U.S. EPA Board of Scientific Counselors reports.

She also serves on the editorial board for Risk Analysis and as Associate or Risk Communication Area Editor for the journals  Journal of Risk Research, and Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, and reviews for numerous technical journals. Bostrom has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Institutes of Health, among other sources.

Bostrom is the recipient of several fellowships, including the American Statistical Association/ National Science Foundation/Bureau of Labor Statistics Research Associateship (1991-92), Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship and Lois Roth Endowment Fund grant for studies at the University of Stockholm (1989-90), and Patricia Roberts Harris Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon (1988-89). She is also the recipient of the 1997 Chauncey Starr award for a young risk analyst from the Society for Risk Analysis for her work on mental models of hazardous processes. Bostrom is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Bostrom is currently a member of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk Scientific Committee, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Science Advisory Board Environmental Information Services Working Group, and the National Research Council Committee to Review the IRIS process. She is the past president of the Society for Risk Analysis, and is a member of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

Bostrom holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis from Carnegie Mellon University, an MBA from Western Washington University, a BA in English from the University of Washington, and completed postdoctoral studies in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and in cognitive aspects of survey methodology at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Julie Brines’s research interests include gender stratification, family and household dynamics, parental issues, and labor markets and employment. She conducts research on patterns of resource allocation and work (both paid and unpaid) in families, and their consequences for family stability and members’ well being. One paper currently under review (2nd R&R at American Sociological Review) uses NSFH data to test the relationship between gender differentiation in the division of housework and the frequency of sex in marriage; this paper (co-authored with Sabino Kornrich and Katrina Leupp, both recent CSDE graduate fellows) shows that compared to those with an egalitarian division of labor, gender-traditional couples have more frequent sex and report greater satisfaction with their relationships. Another paper with Leupp and Kornrich examines trends in dual-earner couples’ reliance on nonstandard employment schedules (especially evening and nightshift employment) and shows how this reliance has become increasingly conditioned on educational attainment; this paper is slated for submission to the journal Demography. Brines’s most recent research makes use of ideas from sociology, the economics of the family, and behavioral economics to analyze the effects of changes in local labor and housing markets immediately before and during the Great Recession on county-level rates of filing for divorce. With her collaborator Brain Serafini (another CSDE fellow), she has modeled rates of marital disruption between January 2000 -2010 using data from the Washington State courts to see how recession-driven changes in the environment affect marital stability. One paper from this project shows that unemployment increases filing rates, whereas falling housing prices depress filings, but both of these effects occur only during recessionary periods. These and other findings suggest offsetting effects of local market erosion that impact households differently depending on their income and asset positions. A second paper compares the impact of recession-linked change in unemployment, job-sector composition and wage rates, and housing prices on marital stability among couples with children vs. those without children at home.

Callie Burt is currently an Associate Professor in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, where she also holds affiliation with the Center for Research on Interpersonal Violence (CRIV). From 2015-2019 she was an assistant to associate professor in the Sociology Department at the UW. Her research is motivated by the desire to understand how experiences of social adversity profoundly shaped by social position influence development and risky behavior, focusing on psychosocial orientations that induce “choices” shaping health-risk behaviors and perpetuating inequalities. With an NICHD K01 award, she is working to engage in and contribute to interdisciplinary research on population health disparities with training in genomics and statistical genetics.