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Small Area Estimation in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

This week CSDE Affiliate and Professor of Statistics Jon Wakefield will present his research on measuring the under-five mortality rate (U5MR) in low- and middle-income countries. In this talk, he will describe models that have been developed to produce the official United Nations (UN) subnational U5MR estimates in 22 countries. He will also discuss strategies for dealing with data sparsity and time and space, discrete and continuous spatial models, and a number of other modeling topics.

You can register for the seminar HERE, and check out all the upcoming topics and register for future seminars on our website.

This seminar is co-sponsored with the Population Health Initiative

UW is Selected as Next Editorial Home for Demography, 2022-2025

The Population Association of America has selected Sara Curran and a team of 25 editorial board members to lead the association’s flagship journal, Demography, for the next three years – from May 2022 through April 2025. Curran, CSDE Director, will be joined by an editorial board of UW faculty in Anthropology, Economics, Geography, Public Policy, Sociology, and Statistics, along with an equal number of faculty from Duke University, Emory University, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, National University of Singapore, Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of British Columbia, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Riverside, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Minnesota. Demography has just moved to an open access platform with Duke University Press and this new organization presents good opportunities for further growing the impact of population research more broadly.

This exciting news is important recognition of the invaluable networks of collaboration with demographers across the country and the University of Washington’s capacities for demographic research. A decade ago, under the leadership of the Professor Emeritus Stewart Tolnay, UW also served as the editorial team home for Demography. CSDE is honored to be selected again and to support outstanding demographic research. UW and CSDE are picking up the editorial reins from Professor Mark Hayward and the Population Research Center at the University of Texas where the journal has been extremely well-managed and grown its scientific impact.

CSDE Welcomes Five Faculty Affiliates!

CSDE’s Executive Committee is pleased to introduce five of our new UW Faculty Affiliates:

  • Roberto OrellanoProfessor, School of Social Work. Dr. Orellana’s current work involves some of the most challenging public-health issues of the day including developing culturally tailored training for Latinx social workers who are providing COVID-19 contact tracing and vaccine promotion among Latinx communities in the Pacific Northwest; a national HIV behavioral surveillance project focused on high-risk populations; and an international indigenous health research training program serving Peru, Guatemala, Nepal and Hawaii.
  • Emma RileyAssistant Professor, Economics. Dr. Riley’s research has a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and primarily utilizes large-scale randomized field experiments. She has on-going research looking at the impact of digital financial technologies on female enterprises and studying the effects of a village-level poverty alleviation program on household welfare.
  • Mienah SharifAssistant Professor, Epidemiology. Dr. Sharif takes a social justice, global and intersectional approach towards examining the nature and determinants of health inequities among racial and ethnic minority groups across the lifecourse. She is especially interested in addressing questions about the influence of structural factors, differential exposure to adverse social conditions and psychosocial factors on indicators of health and wellbeing across various life stages.
  • LaTonya TrotterAssociate Professor, Department of Bioethics and Humanities. Dr. Trotter is a sociologist of medicine whose scholarship is motivated by three things: an empirical commitment to health care as a site of inquiry; a theoretical commitment to understanding the social processes that reproduce inequality in health care; and a methodological commitment to attending to how those processes are reproduced by interactions within the medical workplace.
  • Jevin WestAssociate Professor & Director, Information School. Dr. West builds models, algorithms and interactive visualizations for understanding the flow of information in large knowledge networks. Two particular areas of interest are scholarly communication and intellectual property.

Phipps and Co-Authors Explore the Molecular and Pathology Features of Colorectal Tumors in New Publication

CSDE Affiliate Amanda Phipps and a team of co-authors published this work in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention. The study was exploring the associations between Fusobacterium nucleatum, tumor characteristics, and colorectal cancer survival. The authors highlight that the subspecies of these bacteria negatively impact mortality of colorectal cancer patients and note that effects are particularly driven during tumor stage shifts.

CSDE Computational Demography Working Group Hosts Peter D. Smits

This week, Peter D. Smits will join the CDMG Meeting to speak about his work as a Senior Applied Scientist at Truveta, a healthcare data startup based in Seattle. He was previously at Amazon’s Advertising division (2020-2021). He holds a PhD from the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago (2017), and was a postdoc at UC Berkeley in Integrative Biology (2017-2019). His training is in paleobiology and macroevolutionary biology; his academic work focused on analyzing macroevolutionary and macroecological patterns in the fossil record. His primary interests are Bayesian statistics; multilevel/hierarchical modeling; working with longitudinal, survival and count data; data science (especially working in R); and tabletop role-playing games.

Join this meeting on Wednesday, 11/17/2021, from 2:00 – 3:00 PM PT via THIS Zoom link.

CDWG meets via Zoom; its calendar of events can be found here.