Kristian Jones’ program of research examines how youth mentoring can be utilized to promote positive outcomes for Black youth. As part of his commitment to serving diverse youth, families and communities, his scholarship examines how community-based interventions (such as mentoring) meet the unique needs of vulnerable youth to prevent detrimental outcomes and enhance positive youth development. His current research focuses on how community-based youth mentoring programs promote social justice in the communities they serve. As a Black male scholar, Jones’ research is grounded in his passion for equity and inclusion, specifically as it relates to marginalized youth.
In addition to his research and teaching experience, Jones worked as a behavioral health counselor at the Potter’s House Family and Children Treatment Center in Stone Mountain, GA and was a foster care counselor at Youth Villages in Cookeville, TN. Jones’ clinical experience contributes to his desire to have his research make a tangible impact with individuals and their communities.
Prior to joining the faculty at the UW School of Social Work, Jones received his PhD in social work from the University of Texas at Austin, his master’s of education in counseling from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Albany State University in Albany, GA.
Alison Fohner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Associate Director of the Institute for Public Health Genetics at the University of Washington. As an epidemiologist with multidisciplinary training in genomics, pharmaceutics, bioethics, and data science, she is passionate about identifying sources of individual variability in biomarkers and disease risk, and translating those discoveries into better therapies and population screening. The setting for her research is primarily the Cardiovascular Health Study (CHS), where she has conducted several epidemiologic investigations over the past several years, primarily focused on outcomes related to dementia and cognition.
She is the PI of a K01 grant from the National Institute for Aging focused on identifying plasma proteomic biomarkers associated with cognitive decline and dementia within the CHS cohort. She is also leading efforts within CHS to assay circulating amyloid beta and phosphorylated tau levels in relation to incident dementia and cognitive decline.
In addition to her work with the CHS, she partners with communities in the Yukon Kuskokwim River Delta of Alaska to answer community-driven questions. These questions have included evaluating the influence of diet-derived poly-unsaturated fatty acids on vitamin D levels and drug metabolism, and studying how the transition away from traditional Yup’ik diets is influencing health outcomes. She is passionate about interdisciplinary research that leverages diverse expertise to answer pressing questions in population health.
Kemi M. Doll is a gynecologic oncologist and health services researcher on faculty as an Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Washington. Her training is in epidemiology and clinical research, which she uses to apply health equity frameworks to long-standing racial inequities in endometrial cancer (EC). She has expertise in population-level analyses, community-engaged research, and patient-reported outcomes.
At the University of Washington since 2016, she has pursued a bold and broad research agenda to eliminate the Black-White mortality gap in EC, securing several peer-reviewed, competitive grants from the National Comprehensive Cancer Center Network (NCCN), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparity (NIMHD). In her early career, she received a highly competitive, individual RWJF career development award (Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program), to carry out patient, provider and system level studies to identify modifiable factors to target for intervention for early detection of EC.
Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen is an interdisciplinary data scientist and geographer interested in urbanization, changing landscape, and impacts on human health. She has developed remote sensing approaches combined with machine-learning in order to characterize forms of cities, not only at large scales but also a spatially-explicit resolution close to people’s living environment (e.g., type of housing within walking distance around homes) to understand health disparities.
Erin Blakeney is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Washington School of Nursing and Co-Director of the Institute of Translational Health Science (ITHS) Team Science Core. She has nearly 15 years of experience as a health professions and health services researcher in developing, implementing, and testing team-based approaches to interprofessional education, healthcare, and research. Her program of research is motivated by the knowledge that all too often our health research and care systems do not safely, efficiently, or effectively meet the needs of our population along the entire bench to bedside spectrum. Her current areas of research interest include: (1) identifying best practices and promising models for improving interdisciplinary team dynamics and outcomes in education, research, and clinical settings; (2) understanding mechanisms of action connecting the quality of interdisciplinary team communication and relationships with team effectiveness and team and patient outcomes; (3) discovering strategies to implement and sustain team science training and best practices for individuals and teams carrying out interdisciplinary translational research and practice.
Her past and current work focus on changing the social, cultural, and historic systems that create and
perpetuate inequalities in health research, training, care, and outcomes.
Stipica Mudrazija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health at the University of Washington and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. He studies issues related to population aging, intergenerational support, and health and wellbeing of older adults in the United States and internationally, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies, as well as major foundations and philanthropic organizations. It has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes and featured in media outlets including CNBC, Daily Mail, The Economist, Forbes, Reuters, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Prior to joining the University of Washington, Dr. Mudrazija was a Principal Research Associate at the Urban Institute and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Edward R. Roybal Institute on Aging at the University of Southern California. Dr. Mudrazija holds a doctorate in public policy from The University of Texas at Austin, where he was a graduate research trainee in the Population Research Center, a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Zagreb.
I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Kennesaw State University. Prior to this faculty appointment, I served as a postdoc at Cornell University in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and I received my Ph.D in Sociology from the University of Washington.
My research focuses on topics of residential segregation, neighborhoods and the changing geography of place-based inequalities, and my work has appeared in peer-reviewed outlets like Demography, Urban Affairs Review and Social Forces. Across my research, I’m a data omnivore and a big proponent of the R language for statistics and data visualization. I especially ❤ ggplot2.
A significant share of my ongoing research harnesses web data scraped from online rental housing platforms like Craigslist to understand the role of these information exchanges within the modern housing search process and extract policy-relevant information about rental housing conditions across the United States. This research is enabled by a unique data collection infrastructure based on many containerized Helena scrapers running within a Kubernetes cluster. My colleagues and I have used these data to:
- assess the degree to which different types of neighborhoods are more or less represented online
- measure differences in discourse about housing between neighborhoods
- describe how different sources capture different market segments
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at University of California Santa Cruz. I am broadly interested in statistical methods and tools to address scientific questions in demography, epidemiology, and global health. Currently I work on latent variable modeling in messy, high-dimensional data, space-time models, causal inference, and applications in health data science.
I was previously a postdoctoral researcher working with Forrest Crawford in the Department of Biostatistics at Yale School of Public Health. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, advised by Tyler McCormick.
Kaori Fujishiro, PhD, is a Senior Research Epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As a social epidemiologist in an agency dedicated to improving working people’s health, Kaori has done extensive research on the role work plays in creating health inequalities. Her position at NIOSH has afforded her a unique vantage point for seeing the great potential in linking population health science and occupational health science, two lines of research that so far have developed separately. Because work is governed by existing regulatory structures, research on health and health equity that focuses on work could produce directly actionable knowledge. This direction will be most fruitful if researchers examine the quality of work, not just the presence or absence of work, and interrogate how the quality of work is determined and distributed in society. Through her research, mentoring, and leadership opportunities, Kaori promotes the perspective of work as a structural determinant of health.