CSDE Affiliate Jody Early, Associate Professor at the School of Nursing and Health Studies at University of Washington – Bothell, has just received a national award recognizing her excellence as a mentor. Early received the Karen Denard Goldman Mentor Award from the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE), a nonprofit association that represents health education professionals and students. The award honors SOPHE members who have distinguished themselves as mentors through professional development and by linking research and practice.
Early’s former students and colleagues nominated her for the award. One of them, Sloane Burke Winklemann, now a professor at California State University Northridge, wrote: “As a first generation college student, and now public health professor, who is part Latina, I am astutely aware of the importance a mentor can make in one’s life. Dr. Early tirelessly gives of herself to mentor and guide students as they progress from early scholars to career professionals in public health and beyond.”
Early is a social scientist and health education specialist. Her research, teaching and praxis span over 20 years and are greatly influenced by Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, Uri Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, and bell hooks’ writings on radical education and transnational feminist. Her work with and in communities is rooted in principles of community-based participatory research and the influence of socio-ecological factors on health and health disparities.
In 2015, high rates of microcephaly were reported in Northeast Brazil following the first South American Zika virus outbreak. CSDE Affiliate Ali Mokdad, Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and Chief Strategy Officer for Population Health, is part of a large collaborative effort to understand the association between the Zika outbreak and microcephaly in Brazil between 2015 and 2017. The article, published in PLoS Medicine, merges data from multiple national reporting databases in Brazil to estimate exposure to 9 known or hypothesized causes of microcephaly for every pregnancy nationwide since the beginning of the Zika outbreak, analyzing over 4 million births.
The association between Zika and microcephaly was statistically tested against models with alternative causes or with effect modifiers. The authors found no evidence for alternative non-Zika causes of the 2015-2017 microcephaly outbreak. They estimate an absolute risk of microcephaly of 40.8 per 10,000 births and a relative risk of 16.8 given Zika infection in the first or second trimester of pregnancy. The study therefore strengthens the evidence that congenital Zika infection, particularly in the first 2 trimesters of pregnancy, is associated with microcephaly and less frequently with other birth defects. The finding of no alternative causes for geographic differences in microcephaly rate leads authors to hypothesize that the Northeast region was disproportionately affected by this Zika outbreak, with 94% of an estimated 8.5 million total cases occurring in this region.
According to CSDE Affiliate Katie Baird, Professor of Economics and Division Chair for Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at University of Washington – Tacoma, a striking feature of the growing income gap between generations is that state and federal policy does much less than it could to address it. While spending on Social Security and Medicare keeps rising, investment in education and child care languishes. In a few years, the US will be spending more on repaying federal debt than investing in children and youth. This backdrop helps make the case for House Bill 1592 and Senate Bill 5704, establishing Child Savings Accounts (CSA) for low-income children and currently under consideration by the Washington Legislature.
If passed, Washington would join four other states with statewide CSAs. These programs use public funds to set up savings accounts for children, which over time grow from both private and public investments into them. Once children become adults, they can use their CSA to finance college or make other longer-term investments in their future. “By themselves, Child Savings Accounts will not make the economic challenges facing today’s young adults vanish, nor rebalance the priorities reflected in our federal budget. But they represent an overdue step in the right direction.”
CSDE Affiliate Alexes Harris, Professor of Sociology, was quoted in KNKX’s story titled “Washington lawmakers seek smoother path to redemption for formerly incarcerated residents,” published last week. Washington State lawmakers are reassessing who can clear criminal records and when. The New Hope Act would make it easier for people to leave their past behind by cutting wait times and expanding access to the record-clearing process. Harris, who also leads the country on legal debt research says “You can’t get blood from a stone…There’s no way that someone who is unemployed or underemployed could get out from under this debt.”
Harris has found that people with legal debt across Washington are often poor, struggle to find work, and sometimes strain family relations in order to pay them. “If we don’t remove any of the fiscal barriers for people then this has no bite,” Harris said. The New Hope Act could push Washington further into the foray of re-entry reform by allowing more people to access the record-clearing process, including those convicted of violent crimes such as minor assault and robbery. More importantly, the measure would shave years off the lengthy timeline for clearing someone’s record.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) on the potential development of a secure data enclave within the NIH using existing funds. This enclave would allow approved research organizations to access sensitive non-public NIH information such as information on peer review outcomes, grant progress reports, and demographic information of NIH grant applicants. NIH approval would be required for researchers to access the data. Responses can be submitted here by May 30, 2019.
The NIH is seeking information about this proposed data enclave including examples of research that is currently not pursuable without such access, whether the benefits of a data enclave are worth the opportunity cost of the necessary NIH funds, preferences about accessing a data enclave virtually or in a designated physical location, quantity of “seats” of researchers given access to the data enclave, examples of high level data protection procedures, and examples of potential research outputs from a data enclave. NIH’s Deputy Director for Extramural Research Mike Lauer published a blog post discussing the RFI in greater detail.
Michele Cadigan, UW Sociology
12:30pm-2:00pm • Smith Hall, Room 306, UW Seattle
Abstract: Research on court-imposed monetary sanctions has not fully examined how processes used to manage court debt impact individuals lives. Drawing from both interviews and ethnographic data across Illinois and Washington State, we examine how labor market experiences are shaped by the court’s management of justice-related debt. We conceptualize these processes as procedural pressure points or moments embedded within these management systems that strain individuals’ ability to access and maintain stable employment. As a result, courts undermine their own goal of recouping costs and trap individuals in an cycle of court surveillance.
Format: Cadigan’s paper will be circulated to registered attendees a week in advance of the workshare. Participants are expected to read the paper before the meeting and be prepared for a discussion. Please feel free to bring your lunch. Coffee and cookies will be served.
RSVP: To register for the workshare and receive the paper, please e-mail hbcls@uw.edu .
Wednesday, 13 March | 12:30–1:30pm | Savery (SAV) 409
Finite mixture of regression modeling for exchange market pressures during the financial crisis: A robust Bayesian approach to variable selection
Yi-Chi Chen
Professor, Departments of Economics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, https://researchoutput.ncku.edu.tw/en/persons/yi-chi-chen
We present a novel methodology to perform Bayesian variable selection in finite mixture model of linear regressions, particularly in the presence of heavy-tailed distributions. The new method considers the observations come from a heterogeneous population which is a mixture of a finite number of sub-populations. Within each sub-population, the response variable can be explained by a linear regression on the predictor variables. Moreover, we explore to identify different subsets of variables that are correlated to the response in each sub-population and are robust to outliers in the data. Inference is performed via Markov chain Monte Carlo—a Gibbs sampler with Metropolis-Hastings steps for a class of parameters. Simulated studies highlight the performance of this approach when covariates are highly correlated with various selection criteria. Examples with exchange market pressures during the recent global financial crisis are presented and an extension to mixture models with an unknown number of components is introduced and discussed.
Time & Location
Wednesday Mar. 13, 4:00-5:00 pm, WRF Data Science Studio, 6th Floor of the Physics/Astronomy Tower
Speaker
Cal Biruk – Oberlin College
Title
Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World
Abstract
This talk is based on my recently published book, Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (2018, Duke University Press). Drawing on long term ethnography with demographic survey research projects in rural Malawi, the book tells the life story of quantitative health data, tracking and analyzing their transformation from pencil marks recorded on a survey page into statistics consumed by policy makers, researchers and the public. In this talk, I trace how demographers’ scientific investments in pure, clean data—symbolically represented in surveys that act as a recipe for data collection—are made and unmade by Malawian fieldworkers’ practices and processes on the ground. First, through close analysis of everyday data collection practices, I illustrate how frictions between epistemological metrics for data and the particularities of everyday fieldwork produce—and come to validate—the numerical evidence we use to understand the AIDS epidemic in Malawi. I focus, in particular, on the cultural translation of survey concepts such as probability, the techniques used by fieldworkers to uncover the truth of rural Malawian social realities, and researchers’ efforts to harmonize encounters between fieldworkers and research participants. Standards of data collection, I show, make stability and fixity in numerical representation possible, not despite but because of, their customization by fieldworkers in the field (here, I counter racialized suspicions that fieldworkers are liabilities and center their indispensability to making good numbers). I conclude by gesturing toward connections between my past and present research and reflecting on what anthropology might contribute to critical data studies in the age of Big (and small) Data.
Bio
Cal Biruk is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College. Cal is the author of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Duke U Press, 2018) and numerous articles in venues such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Journal of Modern African Studies, Critical Public Health and Critical African Studies. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of medical anthropology, critical data studies and global health studies. Her second book project, Fake Gays: Metrics, Ethics and Authenticity in African Aid Economies, draws on long term ethnographic work with an LGBT-rights NGO in Malawi to capture the relations and transactions that constitute diverse political, identity, and economic projects that play out within aid geographies in the global South. Fake Gays melds insights from queer theory and critical data studies to show how numbers and quantification become unlikely resources in queer projects on the ground.
Please submit proposals directly to your Divisional Dean by Monday, April 29, 5:00pm. The Dean’s Office needs a short lead time to review and rank A&S proposals and submit them to OR by 5/1/19.
Purpose
The Bridge Funding program provides bridge funding to support faculty to span a temporary funding gap in critical research programs.
Funding Available
Maximum of $50,000 may be applied for through the Provost; all funding requests must be matched 1:1 by the applicant’s college/school. A total of $500,000 is available for each round of awards.
Goal
Bridge Funding awards are typically used to support on-going research programs that have lost funding, although these funds may also be used to support new research directions, at the discretion of the recipient.
Are you a UW graduate student in the final stages of your capstone, thesis or dissertation project? Apply to compete in Three Minute Thesis, where you’ll have the opportunity to present your research in just three minutes for cash prizes totaling $2,500. The 2019 UW Three Minute Thesis (UW 3MT®) Competition is open to all eligible graduate students from Bothell, Tacoma, and Seattle campuses.
Read the eligibility requirements.
The deadline to submit a proposal is April 5 at 11:59 p.m., and the event will be held May 9 at 4 p.m.
The theme for this year’s competition is Impact. As graduate and professional students, you are contributing to significant innovations within your respective fields and disciplines, within your communities and across local and international levels. Whether you have developed a new way of approaching a problem, unearthed an important part of history that needs to be told or created a solution or technology to address a pressing contemporary issue — we want to hear in your proposal how your thesis, capstone, or research project has potential or demonstrated impact!
Participating in 3MT is a great opportunity to:
- Learn to talk about your research without using jargon
- Prepare for job interviews. One UW 3MT winner shared that her three minute talk was useful for answering job interview questions!
- Practice your public speaking skills
- Build your network and your resume
- Receive practice session feedback from Core Programs and UW Libraries staff in a friendly and positive environment
- Compete for cash prizes!
3MT is intended for graduate students who are ready to present their capstone, thesis or dissertation work, rather than for works-in-progress. If you are at an earlier stage with your research, we encourage you to consider Scholars’ Studio events to present your work.
For more information, please visit the UW 3MT website or send questions to uw3mt@uw.edu.