NextGenPop is an undergraduate program in population research that trains and nurtures the next generation of population scientists. The program includes a 2-week, in-person, on-campus summer experience and subsequent virtual components focused on research and professional development. The University of Minnesota is hosting the summer 2026 program in Minneapolis, MN, from June 7 – 19. Participants receive a $1,000 stipend as well as funds to cover travel and living expenses. Classroom instruction and hands-on applications address contemporary social and policy issues in population research, including health disparities, family change, immigration, and social mobility. For more information, please visit the website and application page.

In this paper Komisarow estimates the impact of specialized instructional support personnel—school nurses and social workers—on student outcomes using quasi-experimental variation from North Carolina’s Child and Family Support Teams (CFST) program. The CFST program created two sources of natural variation: directly treated schools received substantial state-funded staffing increases in the form of highly trained two-person teams composed of a school nurse and a school social worker. At the same time, other schools in the same districts experienced more modest staffing increases indirectly through reallocations of existing personnel and district-led compensatory equalization. Using event-study and difference-in-differences designs, Komisarow shows that expanded access to support personnel reduced student absences and chronic absenteeism. In directly treated schools, annual absences decreased by 0.4 days (6%) and chronic absenteeism declined by 0.9 percentage points (12%) among high-risk students. In indirectly treated schools, absences fell by 0.2 days annually (3%) among all students, though effects on chronic absenteeism were not statistically significant. Thus, while large, specialized staffing increases generated substantial improvements for the highest-risk students, smaller and less specialized increases produced modest but broader benefits across all students. These findings demonstrate that school support staff play a critical role in addressing barriers to student learning.

Sarah Komisarow is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics in the Sanford School of Public Policy, a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Child & Family Policy, and a Faculty Scholar at the Duke University Population Research Institute. She is an applied microeconomist with research interests in the economics of education and K-12 education policy. She graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in Public Policy Studies in 2008 and from the University of Chicago with a M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Her personal website can be accessed here: https://sites.google.com/site/sarahkomisarow/home

SDE Affiliate Jing Xu (Anthropology) authored a chapter in a new book titled, Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History. In this chapter, Xu draws on ethnographic records on Chinese children and childhood in the mid twentieth century that reflect three layers of marginality: social margins – ordinary, rural, working-class families in Hong Kong and Taiwan; historiographical margins – ethnographic materials are outside the conventional scope of ‘archival’ history on Chinese childhood; and intellectual margins – children at the periphery of these ethnographies. Xu also presents her rediscovery of a significant yet unpublished fieldnotes archive collected by the late anthropologists Arthur P. Wolf and Margery Wolf between 1958 and 1960 in the world’s first systematic, anthropological research on Han Chinese children. In a separate article, Xu draws on these fieldnotes and combines anthropological expertise and various AI technologies to analyze natural observation texts about children’s peer-interactions. Xu transformed raw fieldnotes into a text-as-data pipeline, discovered  how ethnographic close-reading and AI technologies can complement and augment each other’s value, and shed light on the similarities and differences in how machines and humans learn and make sense of morality.

UW Today recently featured a profile of CSDE Affiliate Magali Blanco (Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences). Originally posted on DEOHS’s blog, the profile highlights Blanco’s research on how air pollution affects the brain, including her work on a mobile monitoring campaign to gather air pollution data around Seattle using a car outfitted with monitoring instruments and her contributions to a long-running study called Adult Changes in Thought that involves examining biomarkers of cognitive deficit in brains donated after end of life.