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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

CSDE Welcomes Dr. Jessica Godwin as Interim Statistical Demographer and Training Director

Newly minted statistics PhD Jessica Godwin joins CSDE in an interim position as a statistical demographer and training director.  We are REALLY lucky to continue to benefit from her statistical prowess and outstanding mentoring skills. Jessica Godwin’s dissertation developed new spatial, demographic and statistical methods for estimating under five mortality.  This work, conducted with CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield, recently informed the UN’s new estimation methods.  Jessica has a suite of outstanding statistical and demographic methodological skills to bring to any research project.  Additionally, Jessica is already familiar with CSDE, having been a trainee and fellow.  This means CSDE will benefit from her presence, at the very least, in terms of both continuity and good ideas for improving the quality of our training program.  Welcome Jessica!

Welcome Back to Campus from the CSDE Director!

CSDE continues to carry on and go with the flow, while drawing on some lessons of the last 18 months to inform our new ‘normal’! Importantly, we’re here to support your research, so don’t hesitate to reach out!
Our lecture series will continue via zoom through the autumn quarter, but with one exception…. we will hold an outdoor reception on October 1 in Grieg Garden from 12:30-1:30pm!  Everyone is welcome to join us, meet new affiliates and new trainees, and take time to catch up with each other.
Meanwhile, we are looking forward to a productive year with events, seminars, working groups, and collaborative initiatives. Our seminar series for this autumn will be an engaging one. Our lecture series committee, ably staffed by Professors Peter Catron (chair), Pat Louie, India Ornelas, and LaShawnDa Pittman, have organized an excellent set of external speakers for the year, along with a great set of internal speakers and panels from amongst our community of scholars.
Some highlights for this autumn include: Benjamin Marx (Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) who will discuss his research on charitable donations in response to disasters; a panel presentation and discussion on the impacts of COVID 19 (including work by CSDE Affiliate Rachel Fyall, Marissa Baker, and Chelsea Rose); CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield (Biostatistics/Statistics) discussing new research on under age 5 mortality estimates; CSDE Trainee Ian Kennedy presenting their research on new ways to observe and understand segregation; CSDE Affiliate Carlos Becerra (Geography, NWFSRDC) presenting research examining racialization, segregation, and immigration; new CSDE Affiliate LaTonya Trotter (Bioethics) discussing findings from her book More than Medicine; Alyasah (Ali) Sewell (Sociology, Emory University) presenting their research on racial health disparities; and Gina Ziervogel (Environmental and Geographic Sciences, University of Cape Town) presenting comparative research on climate adaptation and mitigation.
Our end of the quarter seminar will be the lightning talks series, ably organized by CSDE Trainee Courtney Allen (Sociology). This is an opportunity for trainees to present their work in progress. Please encourage your students and friends to participate!  Additionally, we have a few lecture series openings for the rest of the academic year.  If you want to present your own research or have an idea for a panel presentation, please contact Peter Catron with your ideas (catron@uw.edu). Stay in the loop about CSDE events by signing up for our calendar!
Don’t forget: CSDE’s opening reception is October 1, 12:30-1:30 PM in Grieg Garden. You can meet new affiliates, catch up with friends, meet our new staff, connect with trainees. There will be plenty of food and refreshments. See you there!

~Sara Curran, CSDE Director

CSDE Science Core – Upcoming Workshops

Each quarter, CSDE offers 3-5 workshops on data sources, statistical and biomarker methodology, introductions to analysis programs, and more, all given by CSDE staff and faculty affiliates. These workshops can include hands-on training in novel methods and programming, lectures on innovative data sources, and discussions of important issues in research and data collection. Over the coming academic year, CSDE will offer a diverse and exciting set of workshops, some of which will be offered in person and others remotely via Zoom. Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome to register for our workshops and we welcome registrants from outside the University of Washington for our remote workshops as well.

You can find our workshop website and register for our 2021-2022 workshops here. Our workshop lineup is also listed below. An additional workshop will likely be shortly added to our Winter workshops, so stay tuned!

Please reach out to CSDE’s Training Director, Jessica Godwin (jlg0003@uw.edu) if you have additional workshops you would like to see offered in the future and we will do our best to accommodate those requests.

Fall 2021

  • Microsoft Word for the Social Sciences: Oct. 15, 2021; 1:30-4:20pm; SAV 117
  • Basics of REDCap Survey and Project Design: Oct. 29, 2021; 1:00-3:00pm; SAV 117
  • Introduction to the Northwest Federal Statistics Research Data Center: Nov. 10, 2021; 2:00-3:00pm; Remote via Zoom

Winter 2021

  • Introduction to the UW Data Collaborative: Date/Time TBA
  • SARS-CoV2 Biomarker Methods: Date/Time TBA

Spring 2022

  • GIS in R: Date/Time TBA
  • Basics of Geocoding: Date/Time TBA
  • Agent Based Modeling in R: Date/Time TBA
  • Observational Ethnographic Research: Online and Offline: Date/Time TBA
  • Issues with Dichotomizing Quantitative Biomarker Variables: Date/Time TBA

New Article Published by Affiliate Romanelli and Colleagues

CSDE Affiliate Meghan Romanelli’s collaborative research with colleagues at NYU on adolescent suicide recently received significant attention across the nation. A UW News article summarizes the research findings about how feelings and thoughts are linked to behavior and how those relationships differ across gender, race, and ethnicity. With analyses of the National Youth Risk Behavior surveys form 2015, 2017, and 2019, Romanelli’s team finds that prior research obscured important differences between behavior and thoughts across groups. Instead, these differences are significant and profound. Their study published in Prevention Science finds that Black high school students are almost twice as likely as white students to attempt suicide without reporting any thoughts or plans. And students across racial and ethnic groups who reported certain factors or behaviors — being bullied online, feeling sad or hopeless, a history of sexual violence, smoking cigarettes or misusing prescription opiates — were more likely to report thinking about, planning and attempting suicide, as opposed to having thoughts and plans without an attempt.

Chi Op-Ed, “Adding Dental Benefits to Medicare” Published in The Hill

CSDE Affiliate Donald Chi recently published an Opinion article on The Hill. The article, “Adding Dental Benefits to Medicare,” describes now only how dental care is a privilege afforded to only 30% of older adults in the U.S. Chi highlights several key lessons from Medicaid programming that could be used to strengthen an expanded Medicare policy.