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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Call for Applications: CSDE Lightning Talks Winter 2022 Due 1/28

Applications are currently open for graduate students to present their research and receive feedback at this event, and we would love to receive your submissions. This is a wonderful, low-stakes opportunity to practice your presentation skills and grow your network.

What is the purpose of the session?

This session is a unique opportunity to make new connections with faculty and students working in your area, and to improve your presentation and poster-making skills in advance of larger conferences. Many professional organizations and their associated conferences include space on their programs for posters or lightning talks (sometimes known as flash talks). This session is a great opportunity for:

  • anyone who is preparing a poster presentation for an end-of-the-quarter requirement for a class
  • anyone who is preparing to present work at a conference (anyone prepping for an upcoming PAA [Population Association of America] poster session?!)
  • students who just want to present a research idea and receive feedback. This session can be valuable! Faculty attending the poster sessions find it to be one of the most rewarding experiences because it gives them an opportunity to meet students and talk about research.

What will the session look like?

As of right now, despite our on-campus presence, the lightning talks are scheduled to take place remotely over Zoom. The session will be split into two sections: the Lightning Talks and the Poster Session.

  • Each participant will prepare 3 PowerPoint slides: the first 2 slides will be high-level summaries for the lightning talk portion and the 3rd slide will be the “poster” that you’ll present as people circulate through breakout rooms.
  • Each presenter will have 2-3 minutes for their lighting talk presentation before we move presenters in breakout rooms and allow attendees to circulate.

Two previous winning posters are attached to this email for your perusal!

Will there be judges?

Yes, there will be a faculty panel that will give all participants feedback on their slides and presentation and determine a winner. CSDE will recognize the best poster with an award and prize. Posters will be assessed based on the following criteria:

  • Relevance to demographic research or population health
  • Innovative aspects of the research project
  • Quality and appropriateness of research design and methodology
  • Effectiveness in communicating key aspects of the project
  • Overall design and quality of visuals, images and/or tables

Is my research a fit for the CSDE Trainee lightning talks?

CSDE seeks to build bridges across disciplines and aims to highlight a broad array of research topics. If your research focuses on demographic measures and methods, population growth, population health, population and environment, mobility, migration, fertility, mortality, family composition, life course, neighborhood change, or other related topics, you should consider participating! Learn more about the CSDE HERE.

How do I apply to participate?

You only need to submit a brief abstract and information about yourself and your collaborators on the project. Submit your application HERE. We will select up to 7 participants.

Dates and deadlines:

  • COB Friday, January 28: deadline to submit an abstract
  • COB Friday, February 4: you will be notified if you have been selected
  • COB Friday, February 25: deadline to email presentation slides to Courtney Allen (ckallen@uw.edu)
  • Friday, March 11: CSDE Lightning Talks and Poster Session from 12:30-1:30pm! Zoom link TBA.

Please email ckallen@uw.edu if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing your submissions!

CSDE’s Science and Training Cores Welcome Dr. Jessica Godwin!

CSDE is pleased to announce that Dr. Jessica Godwin has accepted our offer to join CSDE’s Science and Training Cores and joins us fulltime on January 18th!  Welcome Jessica!
Dr. Godwin received her PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington in 2021 and also completed CSDE’s Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods. She was also the recipient of two CSDE fellowships, one from NICHD and one from the Shanahan Endowment. Her dissertation work examined how to best estimate child mortality from various sources and to improve upon national and subnational estimates in places with sparse data.  As part of that effort, she led a study with CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield published in Statistics in Medicine that developed space-time modeling techniques for subnational child mortality estimates in low and middle-income countries. Subnational estimations of child mortality for 22 countries developed in collaboration with UN IGME can be found at https://childmortality.org/. Her broad research interests are demography, Bayesian spatiotemporal methods, survey statistics, and the places where all of those things overlap.  She was born and raised in Alabama and received her M.S. in Statistics at Auburn University. Her thesis, titled “Group lasso for functional logistic regression”, was advised by Nedret Billor. She also received a B.S. in Actuarial Science – the scientific sibling of demography!  Jessica joins CSDE as a Statistical Demographer and the science core is delighted to welcome her to the team.  In addition, Dr. Godwin is picking up the leadership reins of CSDE’s Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods. We can’t think of a better trained statistician and demographer to take up that mantle.  The training core is very pleased to know that it will benefit from Jessica’s good ideas, generosity towards students, and thoughtful advice for students’ successes.  To read more about Dr. Godwin, visit her website: https://jlgodwin.github.io/.

Immigrant Earnings Assimilation in the Age of Modern Mass Migration

This week CSDE is hosting UCLA Associate Professor of Public Policy and American Indian Studies, Randall Akee. His talk will present findings from a recent paper using a unique administrative dataset to observe wage conversion between immigrants and natives from 1981 to 2017.

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

After the seminar, students Leah Neff Warner and Aja M. Sutton will co-facilitate a graduate student discussion with Dr. Akee. Students will have the oppurtunity to discuss research collaborations, professional development, academic publishing, and interdisciplinary research, among other topics. Please RSVP to attend by emailing Leah (leahrnw@uw.edu).

This seminar is co-sponsored with the Population Health Initiative.

Bratman, Errett, and Colleagues New Publication Explores Health Impacts of Wildfire Smoke

With co-authors Anna Humphreys and Elizabeth Walker, CSDE Affiliates Gregory Bratman and Nicole Errett published a new study early this month. The paper (available in full HERE) is a qualitative study of the impacts of rural wildfire smoke on mental health and wellbeing, and opportunities for adaptation. The authors find significant impacts on these outcomes and highlight several potential interventions to bolster resilience to the effects of smoke.

Congratulations to Zack Almquist!

CSDE Affiliate, Training Core PI, and Executive Committee Member Zack Almquist was recently selected as the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, published by Taylor & Francis. You can read more about the journal aims and publication process HERE. Congratulations, Zack!