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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Tolnay Honored by SUNY Albany’s Center for Social and Demographic Analysis

CSDE Affiliate and former editor of Demography Stew Tolnay has just learned that the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at SUNY-Albany has established the Stewart E. Tolnay Graduate Student Research Paper Award.  While Stew is UW Professor Emeritus and the S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology, he previously served on the faculty at SUNY-Albany.  Stew is a remarkable scholar with contributions in many areas, but notably in the fields of historical demography and the social demography of race.  Stew is also known for his remarkable mentorship of early career scholars, as well as some of the most timely and thoughtful guidance for senior scholars.  As editor of Demography (2010-13), he offered three years of carefully crafted and thoughtful editorial letters to numerous authors.  Many editors since have indicated Stew’s standard as a high and worthy bar!
The award reads: The Stewart E. Tolnay Outstanding Graduate Student Research Paper Award is being established by the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis (CSDA) at the University at Albany, SUNY in honor of the contributions that Stewart E. Tolnay made during his leadership of CSDA. Dr. Tolnay brought significant national visibility to CSDA by being the principal investigator on the first center grant awarded to CSDA by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development about 25 years ago. This Award will be presented annually for the best graduate student research paper on the interrelationships among social, economic, and demographic variables.
Congratulations Stew!  We’re so lucky you returned to UW and CSDE! We’ve all benefited tremendously from your presence in our midsts!  Well-deserved!

CSDE Computational Demography Working Group – Jon Agnone, Director of People Analytics, Tableau (10/27 @ 2pm)

CSDE’s Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG) is hosting Jon Agnone, Director of People Analytics at Tableau for its weekly working group meeting. Jon Agnone is a data scientist who works extensively to extend social research into a more dynamic data and visualization context so as to advance both the science and its applications. You can join this meeting on Wednesday, 10/27 from 2:00-3:00 PM PT using THIS Zoom link.
CDWG meets via zoom and its calendar of events can be found here.  Meetings involve brief presentations and plenty of time for Q&A.

*** Extended *** CSDE Lightning Talk Applications due 10/26!

If you would like to be present at this quarter’s CSDE Lightning Talks and Poster Session please submit an abstract by the end of Tuesday, October 26, 2021.
  • What: This is a wonderful, low-stakes opportunity for anyone who has incorporated demographic themes into their research to practice presentation skills and grow their network.
  • How: 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.
  • Where: the lightning talks will take place via Zoom!
  • When…Dates and deadlines:
    • COB Friday, October 26: deadline to submit an abstract
    • COB Friday, October 29: you will be notified if you have been selected
    • COB Friday, November 19: deadline to email presentation slides to Courtney Allen (ckallen@uw.edu)
    • Friday, December 10: CSDE Lightning Talks and Poster Session from 12:30-1:30pm. Zoom link TBA.

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

Inequality, Immigration, & Ethnoracial Stratification in the US

This week, CSDE Affiliate and Administrator at Northwest Federal Statistical Research Data Center (NWFSRDC) Carlos Becerra will be presenting his longitudinal research on trends in socioeconomic outcomes between and within immigrant groups. This work departs from previous research that conceives of national immigrant groups as racially homogeneous; assume that human capital is the best predictor of immigrants’ incorporation in the host society; and only consider inequality between groups neglecting to examine the significance of within group inequality.

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

This seminar is co-sponsored with the Population Health Initiative and the Northwest Federal Statistical Research Data Center (NWFSRDC).

CSDE Welcomes Four New External Affiliates!

Throughout the year, CSDE reviews applications from demographers working at other university, as well as those working in the private and public sector.  These affiliates are keen to engage with CSDE’s scholarly community.  As external affiliates they are able to access our computing resources (including data and software) and online seminars or workshops, consult with our scientific staff, and collaborate easily with CSDE’s UW faculty on research projects.  Non-UW demographers interested in affiliating with CSDE can click here to apply.  This quarter, we welcome four new external affiliates:

  • Kim Korinek — Professor of Sociology and Director of the Asia Center at the University of Utah. Korinek’s research examines the mutually transformative effects of social demographic changes, like population aging and population mobility, and individual and family level experiences of receipt of support, living arrangements, socioeconomic mobility, health care utilization, and other outcomes related to wellbeing.
  • Sam Jenness — Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University. Jenness is an infectious disease epidemiologist specializing in mathematical and computational approaches for studying the drivers of and prevention strategies for infectious disease through the framework of dynamic transmission networks. He leads the EpiModel Research Lab and also collaborates on several projects in both methods and applications for infectious disease epidemiology.
  • Ethan Sharygin – Assistant Professor & Population Research Center Director at Portland State University. Sharygin’s recent work concerns demographic consequences of wildfire, in particular on how first responders can more accurately estimate population in fire zones and how applied demographers can estimate migration in and around disaster areas using innovative small area estimates methods.
  • Jennifer Hook — Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her research areas include gender, family demography, inequality, work-family, social policy, and comparative sociology. Hook’s recent work examines the influence of country context on women’s employment, fathers’ time with children, and the division of household labor, as well as the impacts of state policy and practice on foster children’s outcomes and the economic vulnerability of parents involved with the child welfare system.

Wakefield Awarded Funding to Lead UNICEF & UW Research on Subnational Mortality Among Children Under 5

CSDE affiliate and Executive Committee Member Jon Wakefield will lead the work on a Programme Cooperation Agreement between the University of Washington and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Evidence-based estimation of child mortality is a cornerstone for tracking progress towards child survival goals and for planning national and global health strategies, policies, and interventions. Subnational child mortality estimates are vital indicators for targeted interventions and are highly demanded by countries. These estimates can be used to identify geographic areas or populations with high risk of mortality as the first step to identify bottlenecks and prioritize key interventions to save children’s lives. UNICEF is collaborating with the University of Washington (UW) to further develop robust methods to generate subnational child mortality estimates and tools to apply the methods. Admin-1 and admin-2 are nested geographical partitions of a country (for example, in the USA, states correspond to admin-1 and counties to admin-2). Jon and his group have been working on developing methods for subnational under-five mortality at admin-1 and admin-2 levels and has advanced experience and skillsets in the relevant estimation area. The UW’s work has been approved and published by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) for 22 countries and received excellent comments from countries. Due to high demand from countries, further work is needed (e.g., to extend the method to neonatal mortality rates, and generate estimates for more countries). Funding provided through this agreement is to develop and improve methods on subnational mortality, generate admin-1 and admin-2 level neonatal and under-five mortality estimates, and develop tools and provide technical support to countries.

Grover and Colleagues Receive NSF award to Conduct Research on Coastal Disaster Resilience & Mitigation

The NSF recently awarded a research grant to Michigan Technical University and CSDE Affiliate Himanshu Grover (Co-PI). The project brings together community partners, including a regional planning agency, county officials, and local officials from the Keweenaw Bay Indian community, with university researchers to understand the data gaps in addressing flooding and coastal disaster in two rural counties in Northern Michigan.

Flooding is a leading cause of natural disasters in the US. Flood hazard assessments are a critical tool used to support communities in determining how to mitigate flooding; however, data gaps in current flood hazard modeling tools render them inaccurate for rural communities. The proposed project’s vision is to develop methods that use remote sensing data resources and citizen engagement (crowdsourcing) to address current data gaps for improved flood hazard modeling and visualization that is transferable to other rural communities. The results of the project will expand the traditional frontiers of preparedness and resilience to natural disasters by drawing on the expertise and backgrounds of investigators working at the interface of geological engineering, civil engineering, computer science, marine engineering, urban planning, river and floodplain hydraulics, social science, and remote sensing. This project is part of the Civic Innovation Challenge, a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technology Office, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate and Federal Emergency Management Agency.