Using large-scale news media and social media data, CSDE Affiliate Jelani Ince and co-authors from Indiana University show that nationwide Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests occur concurrently with sharp increases in public attention to components of the BLM agenda. The authors also show that attention to BLM and related concepts is not limited to these brief periods of protest but is sustained after protest has ceased, suggesting that protest events incited a change in public awareness of BLM’s vision of social change and the dissemination of antiracist ideas into popular discourse. This research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; you can read the UW News coverage of the article here.

Winter is over and we’re excited to share the SPRING 2022 SEMINAR SERIES line-up of speakers and topics! We’ll be starting the quarter off hearing from Siri Suh of Brandeis University about her research on post-abortion care and reproductive health politics in Senegal. Other speakers will cover topics of poverty among rural children, issues of migration, deportation, health outcomes for minority populations during the pandemic, and much more.

We are offering the seminar in a hybrid model for the spring. In-person attendees: we look forward to seeing you at the Rosling Center (Room 101). Virtual attendees: please register via the Zoom links for each week as listed on our website.

As Winter quarter comes to a close, we want to send out an extra word of thanks to all the winter quarter presenters and participants. Attendees, thanks for your continued virtual presence and consistently high-caliber questions. As always, special thanks to our fearless faculty organizer, Peter Catron!

If you missed any of the seminars from this past quarter or want to re-experience the brilliance of this quarter’s speakers over spring break, the recordings are available on our YouTube channel!

Congratulations to all our poster presenters for their very good work! Extra kudos to CSDE Trainee Maria Vignau Loria & CSDE Fellow Aasli Nur (joint presentation – Sociology) for winning the best poster award during CSDE’s Winter 2022 Lightning Talks & Poster Session. Vignau Loria & Nur’s presentation, titled “The diffusion of scientific knowledge on family planning behavior: when, where, and by whom is research being done?,” included analysis of publication authorship, descriptively breaking down the geographic dispersion of research activity and the demographics of authors. Many thanks to our other speakers, Nicholas Irons (Statistics), Ihsan Kahveci (Sociology), Zoe Pleasure (Health Systems & Population Health), and Maitreyi Sahu (Health Metrics Sciences), our Interim Training Director Jessica Godwin, and our student coordinator Courtney Allen, for another great CSDE Lightning Talks & Poster Session. Finally, we want to thank everyone who attended and, especially, our wonderful CSDE Faculty Affiliates Panel of poster judges: Bettina Shell-Duncan, Julie Brines, Jessica Jones-Smith, and Darryl Holman.

CSDE Affiliates Ruanne Barnabas and Alison Drake have a forthcoming publication with a number of co-authors now available in pre-print on medRxiv. The authors use the Spectrum AIDS Impact Model to simulate the HIV epidemic in key populations in Viet Nam and evaluated five testing scenarios. Their findings suggest annual or biannual HIV and syphilis testing using dual RDTs among key populations can be cost-effective and support countries in reaching global reduction goals for HIV and syphilis.

CSDE Training Core PI & Executive Committee Member Zack Almquist has new research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) with a number of co-authors. The uneven spread of COVID-19 has resulted in disparate experiences for marginalized populations in urban centers. Using computational models, the authors examine the effects of local cohesion on COVID-19 spread in social contact networks for the city of San Francisco, finding that more early COVID-19 infections occur in areas with strong local cohesion.

CSDE External Affiliate and Washington State University Faculty Anna Zamora-Kapoor, along with several co-authors, has a new article accepted for publication in The Journal of Nutrition. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the article aims to assess the longitudinal relationship between risk of food insecurity in young adulthood and changes in diet-sensitive cardiometabolic health outcomes across ten years among non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Black, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Hispanic adults.

Zamora-Kapoor (Principal Investigator) has also been awarded a three-year grant from the Alzheimer’s Association to study the association between obstructive sleep apnea, a common consequence of obesity, and cognitive performance in American Indians. Congratulations Anna!

In a new article in Health Services Research, CSDE Affiliate Betty Bekemeier with several colleagues conduct a descriptive case study to explore the feasibility and potential value of a community codesigned approach to establish community priorities for health equity policy. The authors find that a combination of information integration and community ranking activities can be used to achieve community-engaged policy prioritization of options in a fairly rapid period of time.

CSDE Affiliate & UW Associate Professor of Biostatistics Marco Carone has new research on statical methodology with several co-authors, available on arXiv HERE. In this article, the authors propose a general framework for testing a multivariate point null hypothesis in which the test statistic is adaptively selected to provide increased power. In simulation studies, they show that tests created using their framework can perform as well as tailor-made methods when the latter are available, and illustrate how their procedure can be used to create tests in two settings in which tailor-made methods are not currently available.