Skip to content
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Understanding Breast Cancer as a Complex System

At the CSDE seminar on January 22nd, Dr. Robert Hiatt will present “Understanding Breast Cancer as a Complex System”. The talk will discuss the “Paradigm Model”,  an agent-based model of breast cancer that assesses the theoretical impact of population-level policy interventions on obesity, environmental toxins, income redistribution and other factors on breast cancer incidence. Dr. Hiatt is Professor and immediate past Chair of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF and also the Associate Director of Population Sciences for the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Register for Dr. Hiatt’s Zoom seminar here. This quarter, CSDE is recording the seminar series and posting the links on its website. Visit our site here.

After the seminar, UW Epidemiology PhD student Taylor Riley will facilitate a graduate student discussion with Dr. Hiatt. RSVP by emailing her at striley@uw.edu.

CSDE Welcomes Four More Faculty Affiliates!

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

  • Raphael Mondesir– Assistant Professor, Sociology, Seattle Pacific University. Mondesir’s research agenda stands at the crossroads of economic sociology, the sociology of religion, global development studies, and political sociology. He is currently investigating how civic participation affects rural development in the absence of a central state and the role of religion in the structuration of civic networks.
  • Steve Mooney – Acting Assistant Professor, Epidemiology, University of Washington. Mooney’s core expertise is in developing and analyzing contextual influences on health. As a part of his National Library of Medicine funded K99/R00 project, he is currently developing software to automatically compile measures of neighborhood context for any location in the United States.
  • Deborah Nadal – Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. Nadal is a cultural and medical anthropologist specialized in South Asia, with extensive fieldwork experience in Jharkhand, Odisha, Rajasthan and Delhi. Currently, she is working on a 3-year post-doctoral project on dog-mediated rabies in rural Gujarat and Maharashtra, India, that draws from medical anthropology, epidemiology and Indology to investigate the social, cultural and religious determinants of this complex public health issue.
  • Lindsay White– Postdoctoral Fellow, Health Sciences, University of Washington. White is a health services researcher focused on quality and costs of care for medically complex patients. She is particularly interested in understanding how features of the health care delivery system and payment policies affect the quality and efficiency of care received by older adults with multimorbidity, with dementia, and people at the end of life.

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.