Join the Open Scholarship Commons for the “Most Wanted” Researcher Summer Series! This set of workshops highlights tools and topics UW researchers are most curious about. In the coming months, workshops such as “Introduction to Text Mining” and “Publish & Protect Your Research: Build a Book Fast with Manifold” will offer practical skills for researchers across campus. Register here to reserve your spot.

CSDE is sad to announce that Pete Guest past away last month. Pete was an important scholar and made very impactful contributions to UW and CSDE. Many of the alum who returned for our 75th anniversary last month made impassioned reference to Pete Guest and his impactful contributions. Charlie Hirschman wrote about Pete in a recently produced history of CSDE and noted: “Pete’s primary research interests were in urban sociology and human ecology, but he published prodigiously on a wide range of topics, including family, political attitudes, race and ethnicity, demographic methods, social stratification, and demographic history….Pete Guest was the faculty member were served the longest and left the deepest legacy on CSDE graduate students and its institutional culture. Pete Guest served four decades on the faculty, including multiple stints in important administrative roles in the Department of Sociology and in CSDE (Director, 1995-97), editor of the flagship journal, Demography (1991-93), PI on many grants from NSF and NICHD, and mentor of dozens of graduate students.”  To read and share more about Pete please visit the obituary available here.

On Friday, June 6th, CSDE celebrated its many graduate students for their accomplishments. We enjoyed snacks, sharing updates, and celebrating! If you’d like to see all those updates, view the slide presentation or read below.

Thank you to all who attended and presented at CSDE’s spring series. CSDE will be pausing its seminar series until Autumn 2025. Stay tuned for upcoming events.  Thank you to our seminar series team – Professor Rawan Arar, Maddie Farris, Jessica Godwin, Jill Fulmore, and Will von Geldern! Thank you to the Evans School for hosting us in Parrington Hall and supporting Will.

In the meantime, keep sending us your news. CSDE E-news will be shifting to a biweekly schedule over the summer.

Among key highlights this year, many students completed their Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods, including Omolara Akingba (PhD Candidate, Epidemiology), Emma Anastasi (PhD Student, Anthropology), Haley Birdoes (MPH Student, Epidemiology), Sarah Kilpatrick, (MS Student, Data Science), Keith Leung (PhD Candidate, Urban Design & Planning), Mingze Li (PhD Student, Sociology), Tom Lindman (PhD Candidate, Public Policy & Management), Sidnee Moyer (PhD Student, Sociology), Mark Nepf (PhD Student, Public Policy & Management), Todd Nobles, (PhD Candidate, Sociology), Larisa Ozeryansky, (PhD Candidate, Individual PhD), Adam Visokay, (PhD Student, Sociology), Jiayuan Wang, (PhD Student, Public Policy & Management), and Yuying Xie (PhD Candidate, Geography) . The certificate equips these students with valuable skills and we are excited to keep working with them throughout their graduate training and beyond.

A few CSDE Trainees and fellows are also graduating and moving onto exciting positions! Jane Dai (PhD, Health Services) will be starting a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Food Systems Planning, University at Buffalo. Tom Lindman (PhD, Public Policy & Management) will be starting a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Larisa Ozeryansky (PhD, Individual PhD) will be finishing her Fulbright at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. We are so impressed with all that these graduates have accomplished, and we hope to stay in touch with them as they continue their journey.

Many students also completed their master’s degrees, including Haley Birdoes (Epidemiology), Adrian Andronicos (Sociology), Sarah Kilpatrick (Data Science), and Jiayuan Wang (Public Policy & Management).

CSDE has always been proud to offer several fellowships, including the NIH T32 DSDT Fellowship and the IMPRS-PHD Fellowship (International Max Planck Research School, Population Health Data Science). This year, we celebrate the students who are completing their NIH T32 Fellowships, including David Coomes, Jane Dai, and Tom Lindman. Continuing in the NIH T32 Fellowship is Courtney Allen, Elizabeth Nova, and Katie Paulson. Adam Visokay is completing the IMPRS-PHD Fellowship. As part of their fellowships, all of these students have received valuable mentorship from CSDE Affiliates.

CSDE is thrilled to announce the inaugural Charles and Josephine Hirschman Award for student research.  The Charles and Josephine Hirschman Award supports research costs for CSDE graduate students. This award is made possible by former CSDE Director and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology, Charles Hirschman, and his wife, Josephine. This year the award went to Todd Nobles (PhD Candidate, Sociology), and Aryaa Rajouria (PhD Candidate, Sociology).

CSDE hosted a 75th & Counting Anniversary Celebration in May and celebrated more than 75 years of demographic research and training at the UW! We were joined by alumni, colleagues, faculty, friends, staff, and students for two days of community building, learning, and refreshments to share reflections and insights about CSDE’S histories, CSDE’s impact on research and training, and CSDE’s future contributions in the next 75 years. CSDE Trainees and Fellows were invited to share their research during a Poster Session and with presentations by Tom Lindman, Adam Visokay, Mark Nepf, David Coomes, Courtney Allen, Aryaa Rajouria, Lauren Woyczynski, Sarah Kilpatrick, Crystal Yu, Jane Dai, Aidan Andronicos, and Ihsan Kahveci. CSDE trainees, affiliates and alumni voted on the posters with Courtney Allen taking 3^rd Place, Mark Nepf receiving 2^nd Place and Aryaa Rajouria being awarded 1^st Place.

In 2025, CSDE will co-sponsor the Applied Research Fellowship Program, alongside The Population Health Initiative, Seattle & King County Public Health, and King County Parks. This program involves a multidisciplinary team of undergraduate and graduate students to tackle population health challenges. Participating students include Sarah Desai, Nupur Gorkar, Xinyuan Hao, Mark Nepf, and Annie Xu.  They will be working on a project to identify and map the array of park accessibility concerns across the city and county.

Members of our CSDE community had an impactful presence at population health events throughout the year! At the 2025 PAA (Population Association of America) meeting, trainees and fellows were selected for oral presentations, including Courtney Allen, David Coomes, Elizabeth Nova, Katie Paulson, Crystal Yu, Adam Visokay, Jessica Warren, and Zoe Pleasure. Several also attended as poster presenters, including Hana Brown, David Coomes, Ihsan Kahveci, and Aryaa Rajouria.

CSDE Trainee, Ihsan Kahveci along with UW faculty Nathalie Williams, Paul Hebert, Amy Hagopian, Zack Almquist, and from Berkeley, Tim Thomas really stood out when it came to PAA’s poster awards. They were awarded the PAA Best Poster Award in the Neighborhoods, Environment, Spatial Demography, and Data and Methods Category for their poster titled: The Relationship Between Eviction, Substance Use, and Health Among People Experiencing Homelessness in King County, WA.

Last but not least, we are grateful for all who participated in this year’s autumn and winter Lightning talks, organized by Desiree Salais. Isaac Sederbaum was the autumn winner for their research, “I deadnamed myself until my documents matched” Trans People & the Psychological Costs of Accessing the Safety Net. David Coomes was the winter winner for his research, “The Role of Migration in the Rural-Mortality Penalty”. Lightning talks are always a fun opportunity to bring our CSDE community together around the enlightening research of CSDE trainees. We are excited for all the years to come of this event!

In response to hazards and disasters in some locations, inhabitants are replaced by wealthier residents in a distinct form of gentrification. In a recent report published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, a team of scholars including CSDE External Affiliate Ethan Sharygin (Portland State University) and Affiliate Sameer Shah (Environmental and Forest Sciences) define this phenomenon as “hazard gentrification” and discuss the implications and trade-offs for municipalities, environmental sustainability, and housing equity. This project was partially supported by the CSDE Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant (P2C HD042828) and originated through the 2024 D4 Hack Week: Disasters, Demography, Disparities, and Decisions workshop supported by CSDE, the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES), and the UW eScience Institute. Read the report here.

The United States has a long history of genocide against Native Peoples which is still felt today. One critical aspect of this violence is the forced removal of Native children to federal Indian boarding schools and the use of assimilationist land policies to fracture essential Indigenous kinship networks. In a recent article published in Genealogy, CSDE Affiliate Theresa Rocha Beardall (Sociology) critiques the colonial apparatus of contemporary state child welfare institutions and conceptualizes a “Third Space” in an effort to prevent the continued obscuring of Indigenous governance in the effort to build collective futures. Read the full article here.