One of the best aspects of associating with CSDE are CSDE’s Trainees. Here we take some space to shine a spotlight on a couple of trainees and their recent accomplishments,
Delaney Glass and
Chuck Lanfear, but they are not alone among our trainees who are wonderful colleagues and contributors to population science.
Among our most recent trainees,
Delaney Glass is a biocultural anthropologist in UW’s Department of Anthropology and advised by CSDE Affiliate and Biodemography Lab PI Melanie Martin. Her research interests include human growth and development, social and physical stress, and childhood and adolescence. Her dissertation research examines social stressors become embodied in the context of biobehavioral changes occurring throughout puberty and early adolescence. She plans fieldwork with adolescents living in Amman, Jordan and Irbid, Jordan. She has a wide array of research skills that include R and statistics, qualitative and quantitative methods, biomarker lab assays, and science communication. Plus, she speaks and reads Arabic! Besides her research she is an Assistant Produce of the
Sausage of Science Podcast and a Digital Scholarship Intern,
Anthropology of Children & Youth.
Charles (Chuck) Lanfear is a sociologist whose research investigates the application of statistics and computational methods to questions at the intersection of criminology, sociology, and demography. His current research examines how demographic and built environment characteristics of places influence social control and situational opportunity to determine the distribution of crime in time and place. He has published widely and prolifically with many colleagues, including with his advisor CSDE Affiliate Ross Matsueda. He is also an outstanding instructor and recognized with the UW’s 2020 Excellence in Teaching Award. His latest and biggest news is that he has just been awarded a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Social Investigation at Oxford’s Nuffield College to work with David Kirk and Rob Sampson. Their project will be examining gun violence over the life course using the Project on Human Development in Chicago longitudinal data files.
CSDE, along with partners in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences and the eScience Institute, is among eight awardees across the country selected to develop training programs in advanced data analytics for population health through the NIH’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. This five-year, $1.8 million training program at the UW will fund 25 academic-year graduate fellowships, develop a new training curriculum and contribute to methodological advances in health research at the intersection of demography and data science (see UW News story). Tyler McCormick, associate professor of sociology and statistics, and Jon Wakefield, professor of statistics and biostatistics, led the grant application with support from CSDE Director Sara Curran. The new training program will be led by Zack Almquist, assistant professor of sociology, and will build on CSDE’s graduate certificate in demographic methods by integrating training in advanced statistics and computational methods. For more information, contact Curran at scurran@uw.edu or Almquist at zalmquist@uw.edu or visit the fellowship website.
The NIH review offered high praise for UW’s training program. “The leadership team has well established credentials, complementary expertise, and a strong track record and the proposed program builds on an existing program with demonstrable record of success,” noted reviewers. “The curriculum – which offers coursework in statistical methods, machine learning, coding, databases, data visualization, and data ethics – is well-thought out and will provide trainees with numerous immersive opportunities. The data science training steering committee is excellent and complements traditional training models.”
Additionally, reviewers noted that a “major strength of the curriculum is that the proposed training is not specific to any one data structure but is designed to provide the methodological and theoretical tools to analyze any data using foundational principles and modern computational techniques.”
This funding was designed to fill educational gaps and needs in the behavioral and social sciences research community that are not being addressed by existing educational opportunities, according to the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. More information about the national initiative can be found here.
A recently awarded training grant means that five pre-doctoral candidates in the social sciences have been awarded training grants for the 2020-21 Academic Year. This inaugural cohort began the training program in October 2020 and includes Ian Kennedy (Graduate student in Sociology), Neal Marquez (Graduate student in Sociology), Emily Pollock (Graduate student in Anthropology), Aja Sutton (Graduate student in Geography), and Crystal Yu (Graduate student in Sociology). Kennedy’s research is centered on developing and applying methods of automated data collection and text analysis to better understand how race and class intersect with property advertisements on platforms such as Craigslist; Marquez’s research uses novel data made available by SafeGraph to understand mobility patterns in the United States; Pollock’s research employs novel computational methods and social network analysis to model disease transmission; Sutton’s research applies computational methods to understand how geography impacts disease spread; and Yu’s research looks to improve small area, stochastic estimation techniques through combinations of administrative data, statistics and trace data. This first cohort of trainees reflects the UW’s strengths in data science across a wide array of types of data and analytic approaches. To read more about the announcement, visit UW News or the Fellowship web page.
CSDE Director Sara Curran was a panelist in the University of Washington’s “Coexisting with COVID-19” special series, aired on September 24, 2020. Panelists discussed how COVID-19 plays a role in ensuring every voice and every person is heard and counted in the election and the Census. You can view the session on Youtube here.
The Gates Foundation has announced new opportunities for grand challenges and grand challenge explorations for researchers studying malaria control, maternal nutrition, and smart farming innovations for small-scale producers. The deadlines for these programs are December 2, 2020; January 6, 2021; and February 25, 2021. Each is listed below in separate funding announcements. As always, be sure to reach out to CSDE if you would like support with your application.
The NIH and NSF recently announced two new exciting grant opportunities. NIH’s “Interventions to Reduce the Impact of COVID-19 on Health Disparity and Other Vulnerable Populations” will support projects related to COVID-19 mitigation strategies in the United States. Projects must include a focus on one or more NIH-designated populations that experience health disparities in the United States, or a population identified as vulnerable to COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, or mortality. The grant will support a maximum budget of $250,000 per year. Project proposals should be submitted no later than December 15, 2020.
NSF’s Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet) grant will support development of networks to share information and ideas, coordinate ongoing or planned research activities, foster synthesis and integration through new collaborations on theory building and innovative development of methods and tools. The grants will support 10 -14 projects with a total budget of $10 million. Project proposals should be submitted no later than January 4, 2021.
If you’re considering these funding opportunities, please consider filling out a proposal planning form and you will receive high quality and timely pre-award support for your application from our team!
UW’s Office of Research invites letters of intent for NIA’s MD-PhD Training Program in Alzheimer’s Disease and Its Related Dementias and the Behavioral and Social Sciences. The program is designed to help strengthen the pipeline of physician-scientist leaders dedicated to using social and behavioral science approaches to addressing the nation’s challenges posed by Alzheimer’s disease and its related dementias (AD/ADRD). If you are interested, you should send a one page set of specific aims and your C.V. to research@uw.edu by November 19. The call is due to NIA 2/3/21, so you will need to have your materials in to the Office of Sponsored Programs by 1/25/21 for processing, if you are given the go ahead by the Proposal Review Committee.
This FOA provides support to eligible domestic institutions to develop and implement effective approaches to integrated dual-degree training leading to the award of both an MD and a research doctorate degree (PhD or equivalent). This FOA invites applications from institutions with externally funded grants in the social/behavioral sciences that are relevant to the research topics proposed under this FOA. Fields of graduate training that are responsive to this FOA are economics, health economics, health services research, public policy, healthcare policy, social work, demography, sociology, social epidemiology, and psychology. Integrated medical and graduate research training programs may be built around single disciplines or may be multidisciplinary, may be flexible in structure, and should be consistent with individual institutional strengths. Proposed training programs should be flexible and adaptable in providing each trainee with the appropriate background in the social/behavioral sciences relevant to AD/ADRD research and clinical practice, yet be rigorous enough to enable graduates to function independently in both basic social/behavioral science research and clinical investigation.
The UW Statistical Consulting Service is now available for Fall quarter. Appointments will be held online via Zoom. Faculty and graduate students in the Consulting Program of the Department of Statistics offer free statistical advice to the UW community through scheduled 50-minute consulting appointments during the academic year when classes are in session. For more information and to schedule an appointment, click on the following link:
The consultants have experience primarily with the R statistical analysis system, but they work with clients using whatever statistical package is most convenient for them. (Note: Statistical consulting is for study design and data analysis advice, not software tutorials.) Clients should come to a consulting appointments prepared to provide background information and a clear statement of the scientific aims of their research prior to discussion of particular statistical issues, techniques or analyses.
They provide assistance with:
- the design of studies and experiments, including the preparation of grant proposals
- data visualization and presentation
- choice and application of statistical methods
- development of specialized statistical methods in some cases
About the Consulting Program: This program is a UW course for graduate students in the Department of Statistics. Through this course, students learn how to apply their statistical skills to a variety of real-world problems. Most appointments will have three to four consultants in attendance: two to three student trainees and one faculty advisor. The program is organized around the academic calendar and the participating student consultants change every quarter. Because this is a training program, each consulting appointment has multiple goals. In addition to helping clients, student consultants are developing their consulting skills. Many problems brought to the consulting program require the consultants to research and discuss possible solutions with program colleagues following an appointment in order to determine the most appropriate statistical methods or guidance. In these cases, follow-up appointments are typically scheduled. While resources are limited, some assistance with actual data analyses can be provided on a case-by-case basis, depending on consultant availability, client needs, the size of the problem, and data analysis tasks.
Are you a graduate student who wants to communicate your capstone, research or pedagogy to a wider audience? Would you like to get feedback about your virtual presentation style from a group of supportive and interdisciplinary people? Then submit a proposal by Monday, October 26 for an opportunity to present at the virtual Scholars’ Studio—a fun, low stakes way to give a 5 minute lightning talk! This virtual event on Thursday, November 19 is a collaboration between the UW Libraries Research Commons and Core Programs—Office of Graduate Student Affairs in The Graduate School. Send questions to mundtm@uw.edu.