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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

CSDE Welcomes Five Faculty Affiliates!

CSDE’s Executive Committee is pleased to introduce five of our new UW Faculty Affiliates:

  • Roberto Orellano—Professor, School of Social Work. Dr. Orellana’s current work involves some of the most challenging public-health issues of the day including developing culturally tailored training for Latinx social workers who are providing COVID-19 contact tracing and vaccine promotion among Latinx communities in the Pacific Northwest; a national HIV behavioral surveillance project focused on high-risk populations; and an international indigenous health research training program serving Peru, Guatemala, Nepal and Hawaii.
  • Emma Riley—Assistant Professor, Economics. Dr. Riley’s research has a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and primarily utilizes large-scale randomized field experiments. She has on-going research looking at the impact of digital financial technologies on female enterprises and studying the effects of a village-level poverty alleviation program on household welfare.
  • Mienah Sharif—Assistant Professor, Epidemiology. Dr. Sharif takes a social justice, global and intersectional approach towards examining the nature and determinants of health inequities among racial and ethnic minority groups across the lifecourse. She is especially interested in addressing questions about the influence of structural factors, differential exposure to adverse social conditions and psychosocial factors on indicators of health and wellbeing across various life stages.
  • LaTonya Trotter—Associate Professor, Department of Bioethics and Humanities. Dr. Trotter is a sociologist of medicine whose scholarship is motivated by three things: an empirical commitment to health care as a site of inquiry; a theoretical commitment to understanding the social processes that reproduce inequality in health care; and a methodological commitment to attending to how those processes are reproduced by interactions within the medical workplace.
  • Jevin West—Associate Professor & Director, Information School. Dr. West builds models, algorithms and interactive visualizations for understanding the flow of information in large knowledge networks. Two particular areas of interest are scholarly communication and intellectual property.

Phipps and Co-Authors Explore the Molecular and Pathology Features of Colorectal Tumors in New Publication

CSDE Affiliate Amanda Phipps and a team of co-authors published this work in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention. The study was exploring the associations between Fusobacterium nucleatum, tumor characteristics, and colorectal cancer survival. The authors highlight that the subspecies of these bacteria negatively impact mortality of colorectal cancer patients and note that effects are particularly driven during tumor stage shifts.

CSDE Computational Demography Working Group Hosts Peter D. Smits

This week, Peter D. Smits will join the CDMG Meeting to speak about his work as a Senior Applied Scientist at Truveta, a healthcare data startup based in Seattle. He was previously at Amazon’s Advertising division (2020-2021). He holds a PhD from the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago (2017), and was a postdoc at UC Berkeley in Integrative Biology (2017-2019). His training is in paleobiology and macroevolutionary biology; his academic work focused on analyzing macroevolutionary and macroecological patterns in the fossil record. His primary interests are Bayesian statistics; multilevel/hierarchical modeling; working with longitudinal, survival and count data; data science (especially working in R); and tabletop role-playing games.

Join this meeting on Wednesday, 11/17/2021, from 2:00 – 3:00 PM PT via THIS Zoom link.

CDWG meets via Zoom; its calendar of events can be found here.