Dr. Tracy Mroz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, School of Medicine at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the impact of health policy and delivery system factors on access to and quality of post-acute care services for older adults and adults with disabilities, with an emphasis on home health care and care provided in rural communities. As an investigator with the WWAMI Rural Health Research Center and the UW Center for Health Workforce Studies, she is leading studies on post-acute care in rural communities and therapy workforce.
Dr. Mroz and co-authors recently published an article in Health Affairs examining the effect of Medicare rural add-on payments on the number of home health agencies serving rural counties. Exploiting a pseudo-natural experiment created by variation in rural add-on payment amounts over time, the authors use publicly available data from Home Health Compare to examine how rural add-on payments affected the number of home health agencies serving rural counties from 2002-2017. They find that supply changes are similar in rural counties adjacent to urban areas and in urban counties regardless of add-on payments, however only higher add-on payments keep supply changes in rural counties not adjacent to urban areas on pace with those in urban counties. To read the article, please click here.
Dr. Clair Yang is an Assistant Professor specializing in Chinese Economics in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. She is also a non-resident scholar at the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), UC San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Strategy from Northwestern University. Most recently, Dr. Yang was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Her research is in the area of political economy, applied microeconomics and the Chinese economy.
Dr. Yang and coauthors recently published a study in Economics Letters examining the data quality of the Chinese Industrial Census (CIC). Employing a novel statistical method, Benford’s test, the authors show that the method is effective in uncovering data irregularities. Based on predicted industrial output by variables that are less manipulable, such as employment and electricity, the study further demonstrates that firms differ in data manipulation behavior by ownership type. The authors find no conclusive evidence of data manipulation by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), whereas private firms tend to under-report performance.
She has also been quoted in The New York Times and Patch in articles on harbinger research and how states manage coronavirus restrictions, respectively.
Dr. Kivan Polimis is a data scientist at Atlas Analytics in Houston, Texas. He is also a CSDE alum, currently a CSDE regional affiliate, and a research affiliate at the Bocconi Institute for Data Science and Analytics (BIDSA). Previously, he served as a data scientist with MAANA after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Università Bocconi’s Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy in Milan. He has also worked with UW’s Data Science for Social Good and Microsoft to develop programming solutions in transportation infrastructure and the legal system.
Dr. Polimis’ research focuses on combining computational social science approaches with large scale social media to evaluate population dynamics. As a computational social scientist, his interests include structural inequality, natural language processing, and developing programming solutions (policy and software) to social problems. Dr. Polimis has recently published in Population Research and Policy Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Population and Development Review and Socius on a variety of topics.
Dr. Paula Nurius is Associate Dean, Transdisciplinary Scholarship at the UW School of Social Work was recently honored with her election as Fellow of the National American Academy of Social Work and of Social Welfare and of the Society for Social Work & Research. She is also the inaugural recipient of the GADE National Leadership in Doctoral Education Award and was named one of Social Work’s top 25 female scholars on the basis of her scholarship impact.
Professor Nurius studies processes and effects of stress and trauma focusing on vulnerable and socially disadvantaged populations, early/preventive intervention, and fostering resilience. Her research on life course stress integrates structural, psychosocial, and biobehavioral mechanisms, distinguishing direct, cumulative, and interactive effects of early and later life stress exposures alongside protective factors. She currently leads a research team selected to receive a UW Population Health Initiative grant to study mental health among college students.
Dr. Nurius served as doctoral program director for 7 years, directed a Prevention Research Training program at UW and funded by NIMH for 16 years, has been a faculty mentor and advisor across multiple training programs, and has taught a range of interdisciplinary graduate courses. She has served as Vice-President of the Society for Social Work & Research (SWWR) and the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education, co-leads SSWR efforts relating to national research capacity building and advancing research career supports within social work, and is active in university and national initiatives focused on evolving models of transdisciplinary research, translational pathways between research and its societal impact, and implications for research and professional degree training.
The Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative is recruiting a full-time postdoctoral scholar to work on data-driven research projects to address the causes of and solutions to the housing and homelessness crisis in Portland and surrounding communities, including identifying racialized barriers to accessing services.
The position’s expected start date is October 2020 and is based in Portland with the option to work remotely for some or all of the position. The position is suitable for graduating doctoral students who are looking to gain research experience and further career development in either academic or applied settings. The deadline to apply is Sept. 6th. For more information, please see the position description at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sDs2JJwX6g4DeGohwgBlMnEbvWk0qJuK/view.
Stewart Tolnay, CSDE Affiliate and S. Frank Miyamoto Professor Emeritus of Sociology recently published Less Than Righteous (Independent). Tolnay is a longstanding expert in historical demography, and a leading authority on The Great Migration, and lynching. His research has sought to document these racialized elements of the nation’s history and explain large-scale demographic trends and how they have influenced Black American populations throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
He has been studying the demographic patterns and history of Black Americans since he was a graduate student at the University of Washington, where he received his BA, MA and PhD, but his interest in the rural South and lynching was ignited when he left Seattle for his first position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia in Athens. In the preface of his 1999 scholarly book, The Bottom Rung, which examined the demographic and economic plight of Black Southern farm families during the time of the Great Migration, Tolnay wrote that the study resulted from the intersection of his professional training and personal experiences. The same is true for his debut novel, Less Than Righteous, which is the culmination of 40 years of this scholarly work and professional and personal interests in the lived experiences of Black Americans in the context of mid-20th century racism in the South and North, dislocation and demographic and economic change. By exploring the meaning of these conditions for individuals and their personal emotional experiences through multidimensional fictional characters, the novel illuminates American history, especially race relations in multiple contexts, and the capacity of humans to survive and navigate harsh and threatening circumstances.
The novel interweaves the life stories of a father, his son and other family members, at similar stages of life, moving between life in rural Georgia in the 1940’s, and life in Everett, WA through the 1960’s, during the time when Tolnay grew up in Everett. He discusses the book, and a broad range of issues relating to race relations, and racial violence in the past and today on the Sno-Isle Libraries Check It Out podcast (August 26, 2020). In the podcast, he explains that research leaves out the personal emotional experiences behind the patterns and trends uncovered from large data sources. Writing the novel allowed him “to take those conclusions that I had drawn from my nonfiction writing and research and bring it down to a personal level, to try to highlight it in a way that is really more accessible to most readers …”.
Less Than Righteous, can be purchased through this link:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/4lpqzQEACAAJ?hl=en
CSDE Director Sara Curran, along with Chris Bachrach (University of Maryland) will moderate an IAPHS Webinar “Health Care – Population Health Science Partnerships: What Can And Can’t They Do”on Thursday, September 17, 2020. The growing interest in population health approaches among health care entities is creating new opportunities for partnerships between health care systems and population health science. This webinar examines the potential, as well as the challenges and limitations, of these partnerships for advancing population health and equity. Featured speakers include Lisa Berkman, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy & Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Philip Alberti, Senior Director, Health Equity Research and Policy at Association of American Medical Colleges; Dawn Alley, Deputy Senior Advisor to the Secretary for Value-based Transformation, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services; Chisara Asomugha, Principal Consultant, FutureHealth Strategies.
Timing: 12:00pm – 1:00pm EST. To register, visit https://iaphs.org/tools-for-success/online-events/