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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

CSDE Spotlight: Eleanor Brindle, Biodemography Director

This week’s CSDE spotlight is on CSDE Biodemography Director Eleanor Brindle. Ms. Brindle joined CSDE in 1999 to facilitate research requiring biomarker data. She holds an MA in Bioanthropology and Demography from Penn State, where she was a graduate trainee at the Population Center. Ms. Brindle is a highly-skilled laboratory research scientist with extensive experience in biomarker methods development and application, grant proposal writing and biodemography. She has co-authored several publications on biomarker methodologies. At CSDE, she provides end-to-end research consultations to both students and faculty for research requiring biomarker data. This includes research support services through methods trainings, one-to-one laboratory training based out of CSDE’s biodemography lab, and various workshops. Ms. Brindle has worked with CSDE Affiliates on many different projects. Her current collaborations include:

Ms. Brindle is responsible for a variety of tasks in these projects, including technical consulting for proposal development; identifying useful biomarkers; assay development; field biomarker data collection including protocol development, budgeting and logistics for supplies, and field team training;  lab work using unconventional sample types; data analysis and lab training support; and quality control monitoring.

In her free time, she enjoys travel and hiking. As CSDE’s Biodemography Director, Brindle always enjoys supporting faculty and student research needs requiring biodemography expertise or advice on biomarker data collection. Feel free to setup a consultation appointment by sending an email to csdeconsult@uw.edu!

Ian Kennedy’s Study on Racialized Language in Seattle-area Rental Ads Makes News!

UW Sociology Graduate Student Ian Kennedy, along with co-authors, including Dr. Chris Hess (CSDE Alum), recently published an article in Social Forces examining “racialized language” in rental ads in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area. The article received significant attention in the media and a special press release from the UW, including a segment on King 5. Using a topic modeling approach, they assess patterns in ad terms and the neighborhoods the ads are tied to. They find a pattern of “racialized language” that can perpetuate neighborhood segregation, using specific terms to describe apartments in different areas of town. The project is supported by CSDE’s UW Data Collaborative and CSDE’s computing core, and employs sophisticated data science techniques for collecting and analyzing data.

Terms like “convenient” and “safe and secure” are more common in neighborhoods with a greater proportion of people of color, while “vintage” and “classic” are more popular in predominantly white neighborhoods. They conclude that words and phrases – certain terms common to some neighborhoods, and certain terms for others – can reinforce perceptions of neighborhoods, influence where people choose to live, and ultimately, create areas of the city where some racial and ethnic groups are more prevalent than others. To read the article click here.

CSDE’s research computing group supported this study through its new national rental listings data source, developed in collaboration with the National Rent project. The project pilot gathered daily rental listing data from Washington state Craigslist posts and other online data sources.  Once successful, the pilot was then scaled up to more cities and the scrapers were adapted to use low memory Kubernetes instances across 8 virtual machines. Currently, this resource scrapes about 60,000 rental data listing per day across 128 US metropolitan areas and a variety of research projects use this data.

 

Spotlight on CSDE Affiliate, Tracy Mroz

Dr. Tracy Mroz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, School of Medicine at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the impact of health policy and delivery system factors on access to and quality of post-acute care services for older adults and adults with disabilities, with an emphasis on home health care and care provided in rural communities. As an investigator with the WWAMI Rural Health Research Center and the UW Center for Health Workforce Studies, she is leading studies on post-acute care in rural communities and therapy workforce.

Dr. Mroz and co-authors recently published an article in Health Affairs examining the effect of Medicare rural add-on payments on the number of home health agencies serving rural counties. Exploiting a pseudo-natural experiment created by variation in rural add-on payment amounts over time, the authors use publicly available data from Home Health Compare to examine how rural add-on payments affected the number of home health agencies serving rural counties from 2002-2017. They find that supply changes are similar in rural counties adjacent to urban areas and in urban counties regardless of add-on payments, however only higher add-on payments keep supply changes in rural counties not adjacent to urban areas on pace with those in urban counties. To read the article, please click here.

 

 

 

 

Spotlight on CSDE Affiliate, Claire Yang

Dr. Clair Yang is an Assistant Professor specializing in Chinese Economics in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. She is also a non-resident scholar at the 21st Century China Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), UC San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Strategy from Northwestern University. Most recently, Dr. Yang was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Her research is in the area of political economy, applied microeconomics and the Chinese economy.

Dr. Yang and coauthors recently published a study in Economics Letters examining the data quality of the Chinese Industrial Census (CIC). Employing a novel statistical method, Benford’s test, the authors show that the method is effective in uncovering data irregularities. Based on predicted industrial output by variables that are less manipulable, such as employment and electricity, the study further demonstrates that firms differ in data manipulation behavior by ownership type. The authors find no conclusive evidence of data manipulation by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), whereas private firms tend to under-report performance.

She has also been quoted in The New York Times and Patch in articles on harbinger research and how states manage coronavirus restrictions, respectively.