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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

CSDE Alumni Spotlight: Maya Magarati Selected for RWJF Research Leaders Program

CSDE alumna Dr. Maya Magarati was selected to participate in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program. Dr. Maya Magarati is a Research Scientist at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute (IWRI) at the School of Social Work and an Affiliate Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology at the University of Washington. The research leaders program connects changemakers across the country—from every profession and field—to learn from and work with one another in creating more just and thriving communities. Specifically, Dr. Magarati was selected to be on a small team of two researchers and one community leader, to provide research support as the teams work with their communities to design and conduct rigorous research to explore critical issues, then apply the findings in real time to advance health and equity.  As a member of the program’s newest cohort, Dr. Magarati will examine how environmental injustices are impacting the health of tribes by partnering with the Akiak Native Community on Alaska’s remote Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

To learn more about Interdisciplinary Research Leaders and RWJF’s other leadership programs, and to meet other participants, visit www.irleaders.org.

CSDE Trainees Spotlights: Glass and Lanfear

One of the best aspects of associating with CSDE are CSDE’s Trainees. Here we take some space to shine a spotlight on a couple of trainees and their recent accomplishments, Delaney Glass and Chuck Lanfear, but they are not alone among our trainees who are wonderful colleagues and contributors to population science.
Among our most recent trainees, Delaney Glass is a biocultural anthropologist in UW’s Department of Anthropology and advised by CSDE Affiliate and Biodemography Lab PI Melanie Martin. Her research interests include human growth and development, social and physical stress, and childhood and adolescence. Her dissertation research examines social stressors become embodied in the context of biobehavioral changes occurring throughout puberty and early adolescence. She plans fieldwork with adolescents living in Amman, Jordan and Irbid, Jordan.  She has a wide array of research skills that include R and statistics, qualitative and quantitative methods, biomarker lab assays, and science communication. Plus, she speaks and reads Arabic! Besides her research she is an Assistant Produce of the Sausage of Science Podcast and a Digital Scholarship Intern, Anthropology of Children & Youth.
Charles (Chuck) Lanfear is a sociologist whose research investigates the application of statistics and computational methods to questions at the intersection of criminology, sociology, and demography.  His current research examines how demographic and built environment characteristics of places influence social control and situational opportunity to determine the distribution of crime in time and place. He has published widely and prolifically with many colleagues, including with his advisor CSDE Affiliate Ross Matsueda. He is also an outstanding instructor and recognized with the UW’s 2020 Excellence in Teaching Award. His latest and biggest news is that he has just been awarded a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Social Investigation at Oxford’s Nuffield College to work with David Kirk and Rob Sampson. Their project will be examining gun violence over the life course using the Project on Human Development in Chicago longitudinal data files.

CSDE Awarded NIH Training Grant for Advanced Data Analytics, Demography & Population Health

CSDE, along with partners in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences and the eScience Institute, is among eight awardees across the country selected to develop training programs in advanced data analytics for population health through the NIH’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. This five-year, $1.8 million training program at the UW will fund 25 academic-year graduate fellowships, develop a new training curriculum and contribute to methodological advances in health research at the intersection of demography and data science (see UW News story). Tyler McCormick, associate professor of sociology and statistics, and Jon Wakefield, professor of statistics and biostatistics, led the grant application with support from CSDE Director Sara Curran. The new training program will be led by Zack Almquist, assistant professor of sociology, and will build on CSDE’s graduate certificate in demographic methods by integrating training in advanced statistics and computational methods. For more information, contact Curran at scurran@uw.edu or Almquist at zalmquist@uw.edu or visit the fellowship website.

The NIH review offered high praise for UW’s training program. “The leadership team has well established credentials, complementary expertise, and a strong track record and the proposed program builds on an existing program with demonstrable record of success,” noted reviewers. “The curriculum – which offers coursework in statistical methods, machine learning, coding, databases, data visualization, and data ethics – is well-thought out and will provide trainees with numerous immersive opportunities.  The data science training steering committee is excellent and complements traditional training models.” 

Additionally, reviewers noted that a “major strength of the curriculum is that the proposed training is not specific to any one data structure but is designed to provide the methodological and theoretical tools to analyze any data using foundational principles and modern computational techniques.”  

This funding was designed to fill educational gaps and needs in the behavioral and social sciences research community that are not being addressed by existing educational opportunities, according to the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. More information about the national initiative can be found here.

 

 

CSDE Awards Advanced Data Analytics Training Awards to Five Pre-Doctoral Candidates

A recently awarded training grant means that five pre-doctoral candidates in the social sciences have been awarded training grants for the 2020-21 Academic Year.  This inaugural cohort began the training program in October 2020 and includes Ian Kennedy (Graduate student in Sociology), Neal Marquez (Graduate student in Sociology), Emily Pollock (Graduate student in Anthropology), Aja Sutton (Graduate student in Geography), and Crystal Yu (Graduate student in Sociology). Kennedy’s research is centered on developing and applying methods of automated data collection and text analysis to better understand how race and class intersect with property advertisements on platforms such as Craigslist; Marquez’s research uses novel data made available by SafeGraph to understand mobility patterns in the United States; Pollock’s research employs novel computational methods and social network analysis to model disease transmission; Sutton’s research applies computational methods to understand how geography impacts disease spread; and Yu’s research looks to improve small area, stochastic estimation techniques through combinations of administrative data, statistics and trace data. This first cohort of trainees reflects the UW’s strengths in data science across a wide array of types of data and analytic approaches. To read more about the announcement, visit UW News or the Fellowship web page. 

Aging Across UW – Third Thursdays

Under the leadership of CSDE Trainee Callie Freitag (doctoral student at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance), Third Thursdays is a monthly gathering of researchers to talk informally about their work in the context of the ongoing pandemic. Each month, the group focuses on a particular dimension of aging research with a particular focus on how the pandemic is influencing all of it. You can also talk about how doing aging research during the pandemic is affecting you as a person. Last week’s discussion covered the social ecological model of health and how social forces shape genetic expression and experiences of Alzheimer’s Disease. If you’d like to participate in the future please email Callie Freitag (freitagc@uw.edu) and look for upcoming announcements in CSDE’s demography events calendar.