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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

CSDE Welcomes Four More Faculty and Regional Affiliates!

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

  • Daniel Casey– Epidemiologist, Public Health- Seattle & King County (PHSKC). Casey’s work focuses on creating and monitoring equitable metrics of residential displacement, local migration patterns, and neighborhood change as part of the Communities of Opportunity project. Casey joins CSDE as a regional affiliate.
  • Horacio Duarte– Acting Instructor, Pediatrics: Infectious Disease; Acting Instructor, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, University of Washington. Duarte is a board certified physician with UW Medicine and a UW instructor of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. His research interests are in mathematical modeling and cost-effectiveness analysis to improve health policy and resource allocation decisions in low- and middle-income countries, with a current focus on HIV-related health outcomes. Duarte joins CSDE as a faculty affiliate.
  • Kathie Friedman – Associate Professor, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies; Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Washington. Friedman’s research focuses on comparative forced migrations and immigration, particularly to the United States and the EU, with a focus on ethnic and political incorporation. Her research has been funded by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, the UW Royalty Research Fund, and the Mellon Foundation. Friedman joins CSDE as a faculty affiliate.
  • Emiko Tajima– Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University of Washington. Tajima’s scholarship focuses on the problem of interpersonal violence, seeking to identify points of intersection, cross-systems issues and to build knowledge regarding specialized populations to improve policies and service provision for victims and their children. She is the executive director of Partners for Our Children. Tajima joins as a CSDE faculty affiliate.

These affiliates bring a wealth of knowledge and unique approaches that enhances our community of demographers and collectively advances population science. We look forward to supporting each of them as they pursue their research. You can learn more about their individual research interests by visiting their affiliate pages, linked above.

If you are interested in becoming an affiliate or you know of someone who should become one, you can invite them to do so by directing them to this page. Affiliate applications are reviewed quarterly, by CSDE’s Executive Committee.

Godwin and Wakefield Publish Research on Space-Time Modeling of Child Mortality in LMICs

CSDE Fellow Jessica Godwin and CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield just published their research on “Space-Time Modeling of Child Mortality at the Admin-2 Level in Low and Middle Income Countries Context” in Statistics in Medicine.  Their work demonstrates innovative approaches in statistical methods for estimating child mortality when data are sparse or variably observed at different levels of aggregation and collected through different methodologies. They extend earlier work to provide estimates at the Admin-2 Level so as to improve information for targeted interventions to reduce child mortality. In the paper they describe four extensions to previous work: (i) combining summary birth history (SBH) data with first birth history (FBH) data, (ii) modeling on a yearly scale, to combine data on a yearly scale with data at coarser time scales, (iii) adjusting direct estimates in Admin‐2 areas where we do not observe any deaths due to small sample sizes, (iv) acknowledge differences in data sources by modeling potential bias arising from the various data sources. The methods are illustrated using household survey and census data from Kenya and Malawi, to produce mortality estimates from 1980 to the time of the most recent survey, and predictions to 2020. To read the article, click here.

Marquez and Wakefield Publish New Research on Innovative Methods for Harmonizing Child Mortality Data Across Disparate Geographic Levels

CSDE Fellow Neal Marquez and CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield recently published “Harmonizing Child Mortality Data at Disparate Geographic Levels” in Statistical Methods in Medical Research. The authors present a new method for analyzing masked survey data, using an approach that is consistent with the data-generating process. In addition, they critique two previously proposed approaches to analyzing masked data and illustrate that they are fundamentally flawed methodologically. To validate their method, they compare their approach with previously formulated solutions in several realistic simulation environments in which the underlying structure of the risk field is known. They simulate samples from spatiotemporal fields in a way that mimics the sampling frame implemented in the most common health surveys in low- and middle-income countries, the Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys. In simulations, the newly proposed approach outperforms previously proposed approaches in terms of minimizing error while increasing the precision of estimates. The approaches are subsequently compared using child mortality data from the Dominican Republic where their findings are reinforced. The ability to accurately increase precision of child mortality estimates, and health outcomes in general, by leveraging various types of data, improves our ability to implement precision public health initiatives and better understand the landscape of geographic health inequalities. To read the article, click here.

Nur and Co-Authors Publish Article on Behavior Adoption Approaches During Public Health Emergencies

CSDE Trainee Aasli Nur and co-authors recently published a practice article in BMJ Global Health titled “Behavior Adoption Approaches During Public Health Emergencies: Implications for the COVID 19 Pandemic and Beyond.” The authors  draw from the emerging evidence on behavior adoption during diverse public health emergencies to develop a framework that contextualizes behavior adoption vis-à-vis a combination of top-down, intermediary and bottom-up approaches. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, they operationalize the contextual framework to demonstrate how these three approaches differ in terms of their implementation, underlying drivers of action, enforcement, reach and uptake. They illustrate how blended strategies that include all three approaches can help accelerate and sustain protective behaviors that will remain important even when safe and effective vaccines become more widely available. They conclude that as the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic and prepares to respond to (re)emerging public health threats, a contextual framework can inform the design, implementation, tracking and evaluation of comprehensive public health and social measures during health emergencies. To read the article, click here.