The NIH will be accepting applications under the new multi-component award structure. Please see PA 26-002 “NIH Collaborative International Research Project (Parent PF5 Clinical Trial Optional)” for more details.
*New* CSSS Seminar: Making All the Pieces Matter: Bridging Theory, Methodology, and Analyses to Uncover Nuance in Parenting and Child Development Research – Debrielle Jacques (02/18/26)
Please join us for our next speaker in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences Seminar Series. Wednesday February 18th at 12:30pm, Debrielle Jacques, Assistant Professor, Psychology, UW will give a seminar titled: Making All the Pieces Matter: Bridging Theory, Methodology, and Analyses to Uncover Nuance in Parenting and Child Development Research.
This seminar will be offered as a hybrid session. Below please find the abstract and information about joining in-person or on Zoom.
Parents with addiction and mental health challenges (also known as psychopathology) can struggle to consistently and responsively meet their children’s needs. This can increase children’s risk for future mental health problems and adverse developmental outcomes. Sometimes the effects of parent addiction and psychopathology are subtle, less “visible”, and unfold in diverse, complicated processes that are difficult for researchers to capture or explain. Consequently, this requires scholars to adopt more sophisticated or creative empirical approaches to enrich our understanding of associations between addiction, psychopathology, parenting, and child development. However, few studies explicitly, intentionally, or strategically combine theories (which help explain complex phenomena) with diverse methods or advanced analytical approaches to explore the nuance, novelty, and complexity of these associations. This talk demonstrates the utility of integrated and intentional theory-methods-analysis approaches via multiple studies that merge developmental theories, diverse methods, and advanced analyses (e.g., longitudinal, structural equation (SEM), and person-centered analyses). Studies 1 and 2 combine affective developmental theories with longitudinal SEM to examine how and why parental substance use and psychopathology uniquely predict infant emotional development and trajectories of anxiety and depression across early childhood. Study 3 combines social-affective-cognitive developmental theories with mixture modeling to examine heterogeneous associations between maternal alcohol dependence, psychopathology, and parental scaffolding and parent-child problem-solving behaviors.
*New* Human Trafficking Prevention Lecture Series: “The Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People (02/19/26)
Join us for the next event in the Human Trafficking Prevention Lecture Series, “The Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People,” taking place on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, from 3:30–5:00 PM in Cunningham Halh. The event is Hosted by the UW Women’s Center and the UW School of Social Work. This lecture features Carolyn DeFord, an activist, advocate, and the founder of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People, a grassroots organization that raises awareness and supports the families of missing and murdered Indigenous people. In her current role as an Anti-Trafficking Program Manager at the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, Carolyn oversees the development and implementation of strategies to prevent and respond to human trafficking in the tribal community. She will share insight into how her extensive experience in the anti-human trafficking field helps empower and protect communities from exploitation and violence while promoting cultural identity and dignity. RSVP here.
Dataindex Launches New Site to Track Changes to Federal Data and Surveys
A new initiative that CSDE helped inform is now up and running. The Dataindex.us provides the public with information and updates about federally-based data and surveys. They also provide a sense of how much risk is associated with the provisioning and sustaining of these data through their assessment map. This is meant to be a resource for the broad community of the public research community and for feedback to them.
*New* ORCID 101: The ORCID iD and Record (02/18/26)
Join UW libraries for a hybrid training, “ORCID 101 : The ORCID iD and Record” on Wednesday, Feb 18, 2026, from 12:00 – 1 pm. A valid ORCID account is now required for all NIH biosketch submissions with the implementation of the new Common Form. No prior experience is necessary for this ‘101’-style session for how to get & use your free ORCID iD and ORCID record. The ORCID Guide from the Health Sciences Library is also kept up to date with information on linking ORCID to UW. Register here to attend live and/or receive the session recording.
CSDE Computational Demography Working Group: Changjie Chen (02/18/2026)
On February 18th from 10-11AM PST, the UW Computational Demography Working Group will host Dr. Changjie Chen (University of Florida). Dr. Chen will deliver a talk titled :Urban digital twins: An emerging computational framework for making sense of cities.” The talk will be held both in person at Raitt 223 and via zoom. A sign-up link is here for Dr. Chen to meet CSDE affiliated students and researchers 1 on 1 during his visit. To receive the newsletter from CDWG, participants may choose to join our listserv here.
ABSTRACT
Cities are complex systems in which physical structures, natural processes, social relations, and human activities coexist and interact across scales. While these interdependencies have long defined urban life, recent advances in data availability, computation, and modeling have dramatically expanded our capacity to represent, integrate, and reason about urban systems. This talk introduces urban digital twins as an emerging computational framework for making sense of cities, providing a means of cultivating integrative knowledge by relating heterogeneous data, models, and system architectures to support informed decision-making about urban futures. The talk examines urban digital twins as computational infrastructures that shape how urban processes are represented, coupled, and explored. It draws primarily on case studies from Florida, where rapid population growth, sea-level rise, and climate-driven risk have positioned the Florida Digital Twin as a living laboratory for methodological and technical innovation. Examples include regionalization methods for cross-scale data harmonization, applications to coastal vulnerability and adaptation planning, and AI-powered 3D city modeling. The talk also considers emerging extensions that incorporate agentic reasoning within digital twins, reframing computational inquiry around how cities can better support human life.
BIOGRAHY
Dr. Changjie Chen is a computational urbanist studying the spatial structure and functional dynamics of cities, with a focus on building scalable and intelligent urban digital twins for modeling, simulation, and planning decision support. His work integrates geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, spatial econometrics, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance computing (HPC) to fuse large-scale, multi-sector urban data with real-time sensor streams into high-fidelity representations of cities across space and time. Leveraging cloud-based data infrastructures, 3D geospatial data, and smart city ontologies, he develops generative AI pipelines that rapidly reconstruct immersive cityscapes and agentic AI systems that autonomously reason about urban complexity, enabling scenario testing, agent-based experimentation, and the simulation of current and future urban conditions
*New* Human Trafficking Prevention Lecture Series: “The Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People (02/19/26)
Join us for the next event in the Human Trafficking Prevention Lecture Series, “The Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People,” taking place on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, from 3:30–5:00 PM in Cunningham Halh. The event is Hosted by the UW Women’s Center and the UW School of Social Work. This lecture features Carolyn DeFord, an activist, advocate, and the founder of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People, a grassroots organization that raises awareness and supports the families of missing and murdered Indigenous people. In her current role as an Anti-Trafficking Program Manager at the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, Carolyn oversees the development and implementation of strategies to prevent and respond to human trafficking in the tribal community. She will share insight into how her extensive experience in the anti-human trafficking field helps empower and protect communities from exploitation and violence while promoting cultural identity and dignity. RSVP here.
NIH Requests Feedback on Research Participant Data Harmonization Proposed Policy by February 20
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is requesting public input on its proposal to establish harmonized and transparent policy requirements for protecting human participant research data. Specifically, NIH proposes to: (1) establish policy requirements for which data should be controlled-access under NIH data sharing policies, and (2) revise the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy to simplify and harmonize requirements.
The full proposal can be found here. Stakeholders are invited to provide feedback on the policy proposals as described in the request for information. Questions may be sent to SciencePolicy@od.nih.gov.
Gendered Dissent and Social Threat: Attitudes Towards Protest Repression in Colombia – Gabriella Levy
We are looking forward to hosting CSDE Affiliate Gabriella Levy from the University of Washington on Friday, October 24 in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative.
What determines support for police restraint in times of social protest? Previous research shows perceptions of protest violence increase support for repression. We argue that protests violating social norms are also seen as less deserving of restraint— even when they pose no physical threat. Focusing on gender-related protests, we test this argument using a survey experiment in Bogota, Colombia, which like many cities in Latin America has repeatedly experienced women-led protests in recent years. Our results show that protests for LGBTQ+ rights and expanded abortion access reduce support for restraint compared to demands that are less threatening to the social order, even though perceptions of violence do not vary by protest goals. Non-violent protest tactics that violate traditional gender norms also reduce support for police restraint. These findings suggest that the right to peacefully protest—an essential component of liberal democracy—is sensitive to the perceived normative subversiveness of protest demands and tactics.
Gabriella Levy is a political scientist who studies the ways that individuals and societies react to and come to terms with political violence in countries in or emerging from civil conflict or other forms of large-scale instability. She focuses on Latin America, particularly Colombia, and primarily uses survey methodologies.
Cha Named UW Royalty Research Fund Awardee
CSDE Affiliate Hyungmin Cha (Sociology) was named a UW Royalty Research Fund (RRF) Awardee in its January 2026 round. RRF will fund Cha to pursue research on homelessness as a life course health risk. Cha will merge the HRS Life History data, the core HRS survey data, and the HRS biomarker/epigenetic aging data to generate nationally representative estimates of the health consequences of homelessness experiences. The UW RRF is a competitive research award program that advance new directions in faculty research and contribute in substantive ways to the health, creativity, and productivity of the research ecosystem.