NICHD has officially announced the winners of the Decoding Maternal Morbidity Challenge. Postdoctoral Scholar Monica Keith and CSDE Affiliate and co-Director of the CSDE Biodemography Lab Melanie Martin won one of seven prizes for $50,000, plus they won an additional $10,000 for addressing health disparities. Thank you to all of those who provided good feedback and advice to them! Monica and Melanie also received $5,000 from CSDE for submitting their proposal and they received administrative help in accessing the data through a DUA submitted through OSP to NICHD. Their project title explains it all: “Structural Equation Model Identifies Causal Pathways Between Social Determinants of Maternal Health, Biomarkers of Allostatic Load, and Hypertensive Disorders of Pregnancy Among U.S. Racial Groups.”
Two New Papers from Wagenaar and Colleagues
CSDE Affiliate Brad Wagenaar has recently published two new articles with a number of co-authors. The first paper, published in Cureus, leverages time-series analysis to explore the use of Emergency Medical Services during the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. The authors report trends in call volume and discuss implications regarding the role of EMS during the outbreak. The second article, published in Evidence-Based Mental Health, presents a model-based threshold cost-benefit assessment of a task-sharing treatment approach for mental health disorders.
New Publication by Williams and Co-Authors Explores the Role of Social Capital in Migration
CSDE Affiliate Nathalie Williams along with a number of co-authors published a new study on how variation in context mediates the effects of social capital on migration. The authors argue that destinations for which migration is logistically difficult to arrange give rise to brokerage industries and hypothesize that brokers, in turn, substitute for the informational capital typically provided by social networks. Their results suggest that migration research should consider the growing role of brokerage agencies and that theorizations of social capital more broadly must contend with how it is delimited by brokers.
Williams and Co-Authors Publish Case Report on Effective Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder
CSDE Affiliate Emily Williams with several co-authors recently released an article in Addiction Science and Clinical Practice. The piece describes the risks associated with poppy seed tea and its connectedness to opioid use disorder. In this case, the authors treat an individual with opioid use disorder by administering buprenorphine, and characterize the success of that treatment.