The UW Population Health Initiative (PHI) has released their call for Tier 3 grant applications. The purpose of this tier of grant is to support faculty and PI-eligible staff to create follow-on opportunities for impactful projects that have developed preliminary data or realized proof-of-concept, and are seeking to scale their efforts and/or expand the scope of their work. The Initiative is seeking applications from interdisciplinary project teams with awards of up to $150,000 per project – or $200,000 per project for teams proposing meaningful partnerships with community-based organizations. Learn more here.
There has been a broad array of research efforts to measure the amount of usage of digital technology (e.g. total screen time) and the observed effects and impact on health. Despite these efforts, the full implications – both positive and negative – on human physiology, psychology, behaviour, well-being and mental health remain unclear. To address this gap, the Huo Family Foundation invites applications for special projects on “The Effects of the Usage of Digital Technology on Brain Development, Social Behaviours and Mental Health in Children and Young People.”
These larger and longer-term research awards would allow researchers of all career stages, collaborating as a multi-disciplinary team with different expertise and skills, to take an integrated approach to tackle the more difficult questions in this domain. Proposals should be tackling key questions within the broad topic of the effects of usage of and exposure to digital technologies on brain development and function (including physiological responses), social behaviour and interactions, and mental health of children and young people.
Awarded research grants in this area can be held at colleges, universities and research institutes in the UK and in the US.
OR Internal deadline: 4/2/2025
OSP deadline: 5/14/2025
Sponsor deadline: 5/23/25
Learn more here.
The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) and Arnold Ventures recently announced a collaborative call for causal research on the criminal justice system. Criminal justice policies and practices include the work of the police, courts, jails, prisons, probation and parole, and immigration detention. Proposals must include causal research designs that can reliably isolate the treatment effects of a policy, practice, or intervention such as difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, and randomized controlled trials.
To be eligible, applicants must be tenure-track assistant professors at a college or university in the U.S. at the start of the grant period. The maximum grant is $100,000. RSF staff will discuss the Causal Research on Criminal Justice System Grants competition application process at a webinar on March 4, 2025, at 2PM ET. Register for the webinar here.
Despite all that is going on, one routine remains – CSDE SEMINAR! Join us for collegiality to boost your mood and some super stimuli for your brain! Here is a link to our
seminar schedule.
Our first week of the seminar will include PAA presentations by CSDE Trainees. Please join us for their presentations to offer them encouragement and constructive feedback. They would REALLY appreciate your presence. Of all the presentations this spring, this is one to attend. The following week is the PAA and there will be no seminar on April 11.
Starting April 18, CSDE welcomes
Dr. Daniel Parker (UC Irvine) for a talk on tracking conflict and cholera from space. Should be fascinating technically and substantively! Then,
Dr. Lake Lui (National University of Taiwan) will speak about the re-institutionalization of marriage among young people in Taiwan. Dr. Lake’s visit is possible through a collaboration with the East Asia Center and the Skinner Fund on a workshop focused on “
The Ultra-Low Birth Rate in East Asia: Crisis Discourses and Collaborative Responses.” On May 2nd,
Dr. Christy Erving (U Texas) will join CSDE to present on life course dynamics of gendered racisms and US black women’s health. On May 9,
Dr. Ann Chih Lin (U of Michigan) will present their work on how states might select immigrants and reshape immigration reform.
Dr. Natasha Iskander (NYU) will join CSDE on May 23 to discuss a new model for temporary worker migration as instantiated in the Qatar case. On May 30,
Dr. Holly Hummer (UBC and CSDE Visiting Affiliate) will present on “Paradoxes of Childlessness in Two Divergent Family Contexts.” Then, mark your calendars on June 6 when wel close out the year with a celebration of our trainees and their accomplishments!
CSDE Affiliate Isabelle Cohen will be leading harmonized impact evaluations of two interventions focused on delaying child marriage in West Africa. She will work with the Centre for Girls Education and Economics PhD candidate T.V. Ninan to evaluate the Pathways to Choice model in northern Nigeria, and with CARE and Evans PhD student and CSDE Trainee Jiayuan Wang to evaluate the Re-IMAGINE model in southern Niger. These interventions are designed to mirror each other, subject to contextual adaptations and focus on empowering adolescent girls to return to school through safe spaces-based interventions. Both evaluations are funded by the Gates Foundation.
The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program has expanded its data available for research to now include information from more than 633,000 participants – a 50% increase from the previous release. These updates enhance the program’s vast and comprehensive dataset, one of the largest globally, to accelerate discoveries that will help tackle complex health challenges.
Updates include:
- The program’s genomic dataset has grown by nearly 70% to include whole genome sequences from more than 414,000 participants. Within this extensive collection, there are more than 1.2 billion genetic variants, including more than 200 million previously unreported genetic variants.
- The number of people with Fitbit data has quadrupled to include information from nearly 60,000 participants. This is the world’s largest publicly available Fitbit dataset, already driving insights on lowering risk for chronic diseases.
- New mental health survey data from 110,000 participants and cognitive task data from 36,000 is also now available to advance and improve how mental disorders are defined, diagnosed, and treated.
The All of Us Researcher Workbench is America’s health research platform, currently powering more than 16,000 studies with tools to support transparent and reproducible science. In total, more than 16,000 researchers from all 50 states and more than 1,100 organizations worldwide are registered to use All of Us data.