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(When) Do Transfers Respond to Need? Evidence from Natural Disasters

This week, Dr. Ben Marx from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be presenting. His talk, titled “(When) Do Transfers Respond to Need? Evidence from Natural Disasters,” covers findings on determinants of disaster donations using data from the American Red Cross. Dr. Marx’s economic research focuses on organizations and programs that benefit disadvantaged groups including charitable giving, government programs, and nonprofits.

You can register for this seminar here and check out all the upcoming topics and register for each individual webinar on our website.

After the seminar, UW Evans PhD student and CSDE Trainee Lizzie Pelletier will facilitate a graduate student discussion with Dr. Marx. RSVP by emailing her at epell@uw.edu.

This seminar is co-sponsored with the Evans School for Public Policy and Governance and the Population Health Initiative.

Congratulations to Three New CSDE Data Science & Demography Fellows

CSDE’s T32 Fellowship program has awarded three new 2-year fellowships to pre-doctoral students to advance their research training at the intersection of data science and demography.  The new fellows are Nicholas Irons (Statistics), Aasli Abdi Nur (Sociology), and Leo Stewart (Information Sciences). Nicholas Irons is a statistics PhD student using Bayesian statistics to study the health, social, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic with the goal of informing public policy. Aasli Abdi Nur will be working on applying data analysis techniques like bibliometric analysis to published literature on the determinants of family planning to understand the state of knowledge in the field. Leo Stewart will be developing demographic and data science methods to represent trans identities by leveraging critical quantitative methods, critical data studies, social network analysis, and empirical work with trans-centric community organizations.  Zack Almquist, CSDE Training Core PI, describes the new fellows additions to the program as rounding out an exciting array of research directions that will advance both demography and data science applications.  For more information about CSDE’s training fellowships visit this page.

An Interview with Trainee Alumna Patwardhan

CSDE Trainee Alumna Vedavati Patwardhan, a recent Public Policy Ph.D. graduate, was interviewed by the Evans School to discuss her research on the impacts of cash-transfer programs for pregnant and nursing mothers on child nutrition outcomes. Patwardhan was recently awarded a grant from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy for this research. Her dissertation spanned the topics of the impact of maternal cash transfers on child nutrition in India, women’s control over household income, and the effect of weather variability on women’s financial decision-making in Malawi.

Read the full interview about her research here.

Tyler McCormick Joins CSDE as Science Core PI

We’re delighted to announce that Tyler McCormick has joined CSDE as its new Science Core PI. Tyler will be working closely with Dr. Matt Dunbar on ways to advance population research and population health insights by developing and supporting collaborations between methodologists and their innovative methodological approaches with CSDE research scientists. McCormick is a social statistician who conducts innovative research around characterizing social networks structure and translation of uncertainty in predictive modeling, amongst other topics.

CSDE is extremely lucky to benefit from Tyler’s expertise and leadership in these areas. Welcome Tyler!

UW Sociology Department Hosting Charles Crabtree Lecture

Join the Sociology Department at Savery Hall room 409 on Wednesday, October 6th for a lecture from Charles Crabtree, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth and Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. His talk, titled, “Patients’ Traits Shape Healthcare Providers’ Choices on How to Best Allocate Life-Saving Care,” will present evidence from three conjoint experiments around ventilator distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic. The lecture will cover, in part, differences in resource allocation according to provider political affiliation, patient probability of survival, and patient race and religion. You can find the full event information here.