Does human behavior and our wider environment interact together to influence our exposure to infectious diseases? This is the type of critical question CSDE Trainee Emily D. Pollock seeks to answer.

Emily received her B.A. in Anthropology from Stanford University, her M.A. in Biological Anthropology from the University of Washington, and is currently a PhD Candidate for Biological Anthropology here at UW. Emily is pursuing her PhD under the supervision of CSDE Affiliate and Professor of Anthropology Dr. Steven Goodreau and her dissertation will explore the question of how human behavior and the wider environments in which young adults exist in have an affect on young adult health, especially in terms of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) such as Chlamydia. In addition, Emily and Dr. Steven Goodreau presented their newly developed research tool at the 2018 National Coalition of STD Directors for STD Engage. They have developed a user-friendly tool for health departments to estimate the impacts of behavior change on adolescent STI burden.

Emily is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow—this is a prestigious program through the NSF that supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported disciplines. Emily was also a Blalock Fellow with the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS) at UW and an IPEM/IGERT Research Fellow, with which she researched “Model Based Approaches to Biological and Cultural Evolution” under the direction of Dr. Steven Goodreau.

Emily takes an interdisciplinary approach to her biological anthropology research as she collaborates with individuals such as Assistant Professor of Epidemiology Christine Khosropour and CSDE Affiliate and Professor of Sociology & Statistics Martina Morris. In addition, Emily completed her CSDE Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods—demonstrating her ability to intertwine demography, computational methods, and population science within her research interests and skills.

Finally, Emily provides crucial support for the CSDE with her position as the CSDE Lightning Talks & Poster Session organizer for this Fall quarter. CSDE is grateful for Emily very proud of her accomplishments!

And don’t forget! CSDE trainees and students must submit project proposals for this quarter’s Lightning Talks & Poster Session HERE by Friday, October 11th!

Mark your calendars! The Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG) is holding its first meeting on Thursday, October 10, 12:00 – 1:30pm in Raitt Hall 114. CDWG is a special interest group cosponsored by CSDE and the eScience Institute. CDWG meets several times a quarter to provide an interdisciplinary forum for discussions of digital and computational approaches to demographic research.

CDWG meetings include informal talks, methods demonstrations, roundtable discussions, and technical tutorials. In the coming year, we plan to host a number of new UW faculty to learn about their work as it intersects with demography and data science. We also plan to organize several of our tutorials around the theme of developing an R package for academic research, focusing on meeting the needs of researchers who work with demographic and spatial neighborhood data.

For the first CDWG meeting, graduate students Neal Marquez and Lee Fiorio will present on “Differential Privacy, the US Census, and What It Means For Policy Makers and Social Science Researchers.”

If you are are interested in the CDWG, you can find out more by visiting the CDWG website or by joining the mailing list.

CSDE Affiliate and Assistant Professor at the UW School of Social Work Jane Lee is starting the “Early Career Women Faculty of Color Working Group”.

This working group aims to support early career women faculty of color by enabling connections, sharing resources for career navigation, and promoting collaborations for research and scholarship. The group seeks to build community and foster a mutual and energizing space to discuss unique issues related to academia for women of color who are early in their careers. While working group members will collectively identify goals and topics for meetings, potential issues to explore may include: mentorship, networking, tenure and promotion, grantsmanship and funding opportunities, and writing workshops.

This working group will meet approximately once a month with the first meeting taking place on Friday, November 1 at 11:30am in the Cascade Room of the UW Club.

Calling all CSDE Trainees and Students! Have you made progress on a population science project and want feedback? Want to work through some new ideas in a critical but supportive setting? We want to hear about it and it’s also time to submit project abstracts to CSDE’s Fall Lightning Talks! 

This Lightning Talks and Poster session is a great opportunity to make new connections with faculty and students working in your area, and to improve your presentation and poster-making skills in advance of conferences. We will select up to 7 students to give a brief (2-3 min) talk to introduce the research displayed in their poster.  

The deadline to submit an application is Friday, October 11^th.  You only need to submit a brief abstract and information about yourself and your collaborators on the project. Submit your application HERE. 

The Lightning Talks will take place Friday, December 6, 2019, 12:30-1:30 PM in Room Green A, Research Commons, Allen Library.

Karen Fredriksen Goldsen, Ph.D., Professor, UW Department of Sociology and UW Director of Healthy Generations

Fifty years ago the Stonewall riots erupted, often characterized as the spark of the modern gay rights movement. Resulting from social, economic, and environmental disadvantage, health inequities have systematically created greater obstacles to aging for LGBTQ older adults. In this presentation, Professor Karen Fredriksen Goldsen will share findings from the landmark longitudinal project, Aging with Pride: National Health, Aging and Sexuality/Gender Study.