Archives: Affiliates

Magali Blanco is an environmental exposure scientist with additional training in epidemiology, biostatistics, and data science. Her current research interests are around air pollution exposure assessment, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), and social disparities. The focus of her recently funded diversity MOSAIC K99/R00 is to better understand the mechanisms by which air pollution may impact Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) neuropathologies. This research will leverage her training and interests in air pollution monitoring design, quantitative exposure assessment, environmental health, ADRD, exposure mixtures, and advanced epidemiology.

Sana Khalil is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Washington Tacoma. Dr. Khalil obtained her doctoral degree in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September 2022, where she was a US Fulbright doctoral fellow and received the 2018 Solomon Barkin Award for best research on improving the conditions of the working class. Her research interests are in applied microeconomics and econometrics, centered on exploring social and economic inequalities. In her research, she integrates experimental and quasi-experimental techniques with qualitative surveys to explore issues in labor economics, behavioral economics, environmental resourcemanagement, and gender and development. Her current research spans three interconnected strands: (1) Household water insecurities in Pakistan; (2) Cousin marriage, intrahousehold dynamics, and their impact
on women’s paid work, and (3) labor market inequalities and employers’ hiring practices.

Leah Marcotte is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington (UW), a health services researcher, and a primary care physician. Her research is focused on using community-engaged and implementation research methods in collaboration with community partners and health system leaders to sustainably improve equity and quality in cancer screening.

Prior to pursuing a career as a physician scientist, Dr. Marcotte worked in public policy and in health systems administration, most recently serving as Associate Medical Director for Population Health for the UW health system (2018-2020). In that role, she was exposed to a learning health system model with a focus in health equity in which we partnered with researchers to design and evaluate novel interventions for population health outreach. The experience of leveraging research methods to inform health systems interventions with the goal of improving quality and equity in care motivated me toward a career as a physician scientist. She pursued and was awarded a K12 learning health systems research grant to transition to a career in research. Having not had formal research methods training, she completed a Master of Science degree in Health Services at UW School of Public Health in 2022. She is currently working on a K08 Mentored Clinical Scientist Research Career Development Award proposal focused on addressing breast cancer screening inequities to submit to the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

Audrey Dorélien is CSDE’s Training Core PI and a faculty member in the University of Washington’s Department of Sociology. Previously she taught at the Humphrey School for 10 years.

Dorélien’s research agenda strives to elucidate how human population dynamics and behavior intersect with environmental conditions to affect health. Her work describes demographic and health patterns and attempts to identify causal factors responsible for these patterns. The first strand of her research focuses on the effects of early life exposures (i.e., disease/nutrition/climate) on health both in the United States and in Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, she analyzes how human behavior and population dynamics affect the spread and severity of infectious diseases. Third, Professor Dorélien has conducted research on spatial demography/ urbanization with a focus on health and climate change vulnerability. Her research has appeared in Population Development Review, Demography, Population Health Metrics, Biodemography and Social Biology, Demographic Research, and PLoS ONE.

Prior to joining the Humphrey School, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center and Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health.

She earned her PhD in Public Policy from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, with a concentration in demography from the Office of Population Research.

Eizabeth Korver-Glenn is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She studies, writes, teaches, and speaks about many things, most of them in some way related to racism, White supremacy, markets, or urban/neighborhood inequality. Propelling it all is this aim: to do justice.

Ian Kennedy is a computational social scientist trained working at the intersection of race, digital platforms, and text analysis. Their work aims to contribute to understandings of how contemporary racism, sexism, and transphobia works, in both visible and less visible ways. This means looking for data in new places, like in Craigslist rental ad texts, by developing new uses for large-scale administrative data, or curating large samples of twitter data linked to election misinformation, or through analysis of millions of reddit comments. They are committed to producing useful work beyond scholarly publications, working with groups like the Northwest Justice Project to identify illegal Craigslist ads or with the Election Integrity Partnership to monitor misinformation during the 2020 election.

Aasli Abdi Nur, PhD, MPH, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford specializing in Computational Demography. She currently works on the Connecting Generations project with Professor Ridhi Kashyap, studying demographic changes and their implications for kinship and intergenerational overlap, care, and support. In addition to her departmental appointment, she is also a Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow at Nuffield College.

Aasli’s research uses computational and demographic methods explore two main areas of interest. The first focuses on the use individual-level modelling approaches to study gender, fertility, and family dynamics across the life course. The second examines epistemic inequalities in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge and their impact on demographic research.

Prior to joining Oxford, Aasli worked as a Research Scientist in the Institute for Disease Modelling at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington, where she served as a graduate fellow with the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. Aasli holds an MPH from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Her work has been published in the Journal of Global Health, BMJ Global Health, Women and Birth, and the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

Sameer Shah (he / him) is a John C. Garcia Professor and Assistant Professor of Climate Adaptation in the School of Environmental & Forest Sciences (SEFS) at the University of Washington. Dr. Shah holds expertise in the human dimensions of climate change vulnerability and adaptation. He aims to understand how systemic marginalization, and climate-related change and disasters interact to create and amplify uneven water, food, and energy insecurities for communities on the frontlines of climate change. In particular, his research develops theoretical, conceptual, and empirical analyses of the equity, justice, and sustainability outcomes of climate adaptation and disaster response at multiple scales. Through research in South/Southeast Asia, the contiguous U.S., and Puerto Rico, he and his collaborators seek to advance interventions that reduce the disproportionately larger climate risks experienced by marginalized groups, and to shape long-term policy strategies that transform the underlying systems that heighten these impacts. At SEFS, Dr. Shah directs the WATERS Research Collaborative (Water, Adaptation & Transformation: Equity, Resilience and Sustainability). He is also a co-founder of the SOLVER (Social Vulnerability and Resilience) Research Laboratory.