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.