Archives: Affiliates

Dan Eisenberg’s research interests include evolution, anthropological genetics, human biology, telomere biology, aging, parental effects, and ADHD. His work is broadly focused on studying human variation in its ecological and cultural contexts to better understand health and disease from an evolutionary perspective.

Adrian Dobra’s research interests include computational social science, spatiotemporal modeling, Bayesian statistics, and modeling of complex dynamical phenomena using big data.

Brian Dillon is an economist specializing in the study of food and agricultural markets in developing countries, with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. His work ranges from microeconomic issues up to the level of international trade, covering topics such as household- and firm-level decision making, the operation of domestic markets for agricultural inputs and outputs, and links between domestic and international markets. He is also interested in the general topic of choice under uncertainty, with an emphasis on methodological and econometric issues related to the measurement of expectations.

Butch de Castro’s research focuses on how occupational-related factors influence the health of immigrant and minority worker populations. Specifically, his interest is in investigating how work and employment stressors experienced in the context of migration operate as social determinants of health and contribute to health disparities. The theoretical underpinnings for his research are the “healthy immigrant effect” and “immigrant paradox” hypotheses; the prevailing view being that immigrants (when they enter the US) are generally healthier than their US-born counterparts, though this health advantage declines with increased duration in the US. In the last five years he has published in this area in the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses Journal, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, and Public Health Nursing. He is Co-Investigator (with Dr. Gilbert Gee, UCLA School of Public Health) for a current NCI-funded R21 pilot longitudinal study that investigates obesity risk among immigrants. This transnational research project follows a cohort of immigrants from the Philippines to the US from a pre-migration baseline to up to 1 year post-migration, as well as a comparison non-migrant group. Stressors associated with the immigrant experience (i.e., racial/ethnic discrimination, neighborhood residence, employment transitions, and social support) are being studied in terms of their influence on changes in dietary practices, physical activity, and overall risk of obesity. He also recently received notice of funding from CDC-NIOSH for another R21 project that will assess agricultural-related occupational health and safety risks among Hmong farmers. The project will utilize novel methods including participatory rural appraisal and photovoice, in addition to conventional industrial hygiene observational exposure assessments. Another line of his research involves collaborating with labor unions, primarily those representing immigrant/minority workers such as those employed in the hotel, grocery, and food service industries. He currently has an R01 proposal submitted to NIMHD under review that will utilize a mixed-methods approach to examine differential exposures to occupational hazards based on nativity and minority status among this worker population.

Joe Cook  joined the School of Economic Sciences at Washington State University as an Associate Professor in August 2017 after ten years in the Evans School of Public Policy at the University of Washington.  His research focus has primarily been on water and sanitation policy in low-income countries, water resources economics and policy, and nonmarket valuation.  He has a new focus on green stormwater infrastructure and has an appointment with WSU Extension and the Washington Stormwater Center. He has conducted 12 household surveys in six countries, and is a Research Associate with the Kenya center of the SIDA-funded Environment for Development initiative. Consulting assignments have included work for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Asian Development Bank, the Hopi Tribe (Arizona), and the Washington State legislature. He received masters and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a bachelors degree from Cornell University.

Donald Chi is a health services researcher and pediatric dentist. His research focuses on understanding and addressing the sociobehavioral determinants of oral health inequities. He is specifically interested in deepening our knowledge of health behaviors, developing and testing interventions aimed at improving oral health inequities, and designing policies aimed at addressing structural barriers to health.

Cynthia Chen’s current research interests include human trajectory analysis (travel behavior analysis), demand forecasting, and survey methods. Broadly put, her focus is to understand human movements in time and space. She focuses on characterizing key characteristics of these movements, identifying regular and irregular patterns, and charting out the lifecycle of these patterns over time.

Her past work has primarily focused on analyzing travel behavior dynamics in response to policy changes. She has also studied residential relocation choices by taking a lifecycle perspective. Her other works have also included deploying GPS technologies in travel surveys and designing rigorous experiments to evaluate the safety impacts of traffic calming measures.

Kam Wing Chan’s research is broadly oriented, and he has focused on urbanization in China since 1949. He has studied the special characteristics of China’s urban process and rural-urban migration, including measurements, trends, the migration control system (the hukou system) and the relationships between urbanization and broader social and economic issues such as social justice, education rights, family togetherness, and the development strategy. His recent publications include Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics: The Hukou System and Migration (2018), and Children of Migrants in China (2020). He has served in as a consultant for the United Nations Population Division, World Bank, and McKinsey & Co. on a number of research and policy projects on China. He is active in public scholarship: his commentaries and interviews have appeared in major international and national media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, China Radio International, CBC Radio, The China Daily, and the Caixin Media. 

Sara Curran is director of the UW’s Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology.  Recently, Sara was selected to join the Executive Council of UW President Ana Mari Cauce’s new Population Health Initiative.  This exciting endeavor provides an outstanding opportunity to amplify UW’s substantial health research, training, and applications across the entire campus on behalf of local and global healthy outcomes. She investigates how social contexts, social categories and social structures of power and hierarchies shape human behavior and how human behavior and human interactions reshape social contexts, social categories and social structures.  Sara focus these general investigations around migration, gender, family, demographics and ecological well-being in developing country settings, primarily in Southeast Asia and the U.S.  Her methodological approaches include quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, and program evaluation.

Stewart Tolnay’s recent research has focused on two broad topics: (1) the Great Migration of U.S. southerners to the North and West and (2) the history of racial violence in the American South. His work on the Great Migration was supported by grants from NICHD and NSF and has been published in highly regarded journals such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Demography, Social Science Research, and American Journal of Sociology, as well as in his book The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms (University of Illinois Press, 1999) which received the Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award from the Population Section of the American Sociological Association. Tolnay’s research on the Great Migration has led to important new findings, some of which contradicted conventional wisdom regarding the phenomenon. For example, his research (along with collaborators Trent Alexander, Suzanne Eichenlaub, Katie Genadek, Christine Leibbrand, and Catherine Massey) reveals minimal economic returns to first- and second-generation migrants. Tolnay’s second area of recent research extended his earlier collaboration with E.M. Beck on the environmental correlates of the intensity of southern lynching by exploiting Beck’s new confirmed inventory of threatened lynchings. The findings from that line of work have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology and Social Science History. In a closely related project, and with support from the National Science Foundation, Tolnay and Amy Kate Bailey successfully linked roughly 1,000 lynch victims (approximately 45% of all named victims) to their records in the original enumerators’ manuscripts from the census that immediately preceded their deaths. This linkage allowed the first description of the personal characteristics of a large sample of lynch victims. This new, linked dataset served as the empirical basis for Bailey’s and Tolnay’s award winning book, Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) as well as for articles in the American Sociological Review and Historical Methods. Very recently, Tolnay has drawn from his academic research on these general topics to write his first novel, Less Than Righteous (Kindle Direct Publishing, 2020: https://www.amazon.com/author/stewarttolnay