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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Call for Research Proposals: 2nd Round of Fellowships on Family Planning, Fertility and Urban Development

Call for Research Proposals:2nd Round of Fellowships on Family Planning, Fertility and Urban Development

Deadline to submit concept note: 15 April  2019
Deadline to submit full proposals: 1 July 2019

The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) is pleased to announce the second call for policy-relevant research proposals from early career researchers to:

  • contribute to the evidence base needed to better meet the family planning (FP) and related reproductive health (RH) needs of the most vulnerable in urban areas of countries of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and
  • increase the attention paid to FP, fertility and population growth in urban development policy initiatives at local, national and international levels.

The proposal must focus either on a single city, or represent comparative work on multiple urban areas, of any country of sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia. Eligibility will be limited to citizens of countries in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia currently working in established institutions in those two regions (not necessarily the citizenship country), who have received a Ph.D. (or an MD with some public health or social science training and evidence of research skills) within the past ten years and who are currently affiliated with established institutions in either region.

For more information please see:

Enquiries: Any enquiries should be directed to UrbanFP@iussp.org by 15 June 2019, in order to receive a response prior to the deadline date. (Questions about the concept note phase are due by March 15.)

Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Research Experience in Computational Sciences (Baton Rouge, 05/20-07/26/2019)

Research Experience for Undergraduates

Program: Mon May 20 – Fri July 26 2019

Contact: reu@cct.lsu.edu

The Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) hosts a ten week Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program where students work collaboratively on a wide variety of computational science projects.

Each student receives a stipend of $5,000, free housing in university dormitories, and up to $600 in travel expenses to and from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Ten students will be selected.

Qualifications:

Undergraduate, community college student, or high school senior attending college in the fall, interested in a major that is within the computational sciences umbrella (leaves out few majors as it includes all sciences, mathematics, engineering, finance, statistics, etc.) with at least a 2.75 GPA, considering a career in research and/or graduate school in your major, being a US citizen or permanent resident, and graduating at least one semester after completion of the REU.

Important Dates:

February 15, 2019: Application deadline.

March 15, 2019: Notification of decision.

May 20, 2019 through July 26, 2019: Program dates.

The research activities of the CCT are organized into five Focus

Areas: Core Computing Sciences, Coast to Cosmos, Material World, Cultural Computing, and System Science and Engineering.

These are broad, and sometimes overlapping areas where faculty from diverse departments (Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Civil Engineering, Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Petroleum Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computing Engineering, Music, Business, etc.) collaborate in multidisciplinary projects.

Our REU students learn how to use some of the nation’s largest supercomputers, may participate in the setup and management of large-scale simulations, and may take on an important role in the analysis and visualization of the simulation results.

For more information and to apply, visit: http://reu.cct.lsu.edu/

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The LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, is an innovative research environment, advancing computational sciences, technologies and the disciplines they touch.

Researchers at CCT use the advanced cyberinfrastructure – high-speed networks, high-performance computing, advanced data storage and analysis and hardware and software development – available on campus to enable research in many different fields.

By uniting researchers from diverse disciplines, ideas and expertise are disseminated across LSU departments to foster knowledge and invention.

For more information on the CCT, visit: http://cct.lsu.edu/

 

Royalty Research Fund Grant Program

Members of the UW Research Community:

This is to announce the Spring 2019 round of the Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grant program. The RRF proposal submission and review process is electronic – all proposals are submitted using SAGE (System to Administer Grants Electronically). Proposals are due Monday, March 4, by 5:00 PM.  Awards will be announced by June 15, 2019.

Unlike agency-funded grants, RRF grants are not awarded to supplement or continue existing successful research programs.  The purpose of the RRF is to advance new directions in research, particularly:

  1. in disciplines for which external funding opportunities are minimal, and/or
  2. for faculty who are junior in rank, and/or
  3. in cases where funding may provide unique opportunities to increase applicants’ competitiveness for subsequent funding.

Proposals must demonstrate a high probability of generating important new creative activities or scholarly understandings, new scholarly materials or resources, significant data or information, or essential instrumentation resources that are likely to significantly advance the reputation of the university, lead to external funding, or lead to developing a new technology. Proposals from all disciplines are welcome, with well-justified budgets up to $40,000.

All proposals will be peer reviewed through one of the three RRF Review Committees. The evaluators are faculty colleagues and therefore will not necessarily be specialists in the applicant’s subfield. Thought should be given, therefore, to crafting the proposal so that a wider audience may understand it. Although technical field-specific information will be expected, the major features of the proposal must also be accessible to non-specialists.

The RRF application instructions, including specific directions for completing the eGC1, are currently available at the Office of Research web site located at:

http://www.washington.edu/research/or/royalty-research-fund-rrf/

As a reminder, Deans, Directors, and Chairs should only approve RRF applications for faculty and professional staff with PI status who are eligible for the program. Faculty with acting, affiliate, temporary, or visiting appointments are not eligible. In addition, if a UW faculty member holds an eligible rank but is based at another institution (e.g. Seattle Children’s or Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), all of his/her extramural grants must be run through the UW in order to be eligible for an RRF award.

Should you elect to apply, please note the following additional details:

  1. Carefully read and follow all instructions. Applications that do not adhere to program rules will be returned for immediate correction and resubmission if time permits; otherwise they will not be considered for funding.
  2. Find out how much lead time is required by each unit that needs to approve your proposal and monitor it throughout the approval process. (For example, the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s office requires that proposals reach them via SAGE by 5:00 pm on the Thursday prior to the RRF deadline.) Applications not fully approved by the deadline will not be accepted – NO EXCEPTIONS.
  3. On the Details page of the eGC1, make sure that you choose the Research Area that is most appropriate for your specific project. This will not necessarily match your official departmental affiliation, so you should review the membership of the three RRF committees (each of which covers two Research Areas) to confirm that you are making the best choice. Your proposal has a better chance of being successful if it is appropriately aligned with the expertise of the committee.
  4. Use the sample budget template on our website as a guide when preparing your proposal budget, making sure that a) you round all figures to whole dollars, b) you group items by object code, and c) you provide a subtotal for each object code.

Don’t hesitate to contact the RRF administrative staff if you have questions about the program; new applicants should contact Peter Wilsnack, doogieh@uw.edu, (685-9316) and existing awardees should contact Barbara Thompson, bthompso@uw.edu, (616-9089). Questions about SAGE and the eGC1 should be directed to oris@uw.edu, (685-8335).

Innovation Grants

The EarthLab Innovation Grants Program seeks to engage University of Washington faculty and employees with PI status in the co-definition of transdisciplinary research, scholarship, and creative activity related to our most pressing environmental challenges. We will invest in first-mile challenges – the envisioning, development or piloting of new projects. We encourage proposals from all disciplines at the University of Washington.

Through the Innovation Grants Program, EarthLab hopes to realize the following outcomes: 1) an increase in capacity across the UW for innovations in the application of transdisciplinary scholarship; 2) deepened engagement with diverse community partners (e.g. practitioners, policy makers, tribes and community groups outside of UW), and 3) funded research projects that address co-defined problems from multiple perspectives and that are designed to generate knowledge that is both usable and used.

A total of $175,000 is available in this pilot year, with award amounts between $5,000 and $50,000. There is one $50,000 grant that will be awarded jointly by EarthLab and the UW Population Health Initiative.

The deadline for EarthLab proposals is January 30, 2019, 11:59 pm PST.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at stasiar@uw.edu. For additional information and to review the RFP, please visit: https://earthlab.uw.edu/projects/grants/

Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships

Interested in studying a foreign language and learning about different cultures? The application is now open for FLAS Fellowships, which award $7,500-$33,000 to UW students studying foreign languages.  Applications are due January 31, 2019 at 5 PM PST.

(Available to current and incoming undergraduate, graduate and professional UW students who are U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents).

For more information, visit jsis.washington.edu/advise/funding/flas/

UPCOMING FLAS INFORMATION SESSIONS:

Tuesdays in January (8, 15, 22, 29), 3:30-4:30 PST Web Chats (see FLAS website above for access instructions)

Thursday, Jan 10, 2:30-3:30, Allen Library Auditorium, G81L

Wednesday, Jan 16, 3:30-4:30 Thomson Hall Room 317

Thursday, Jan 24, 1:30-2:30 Thomson Room 317

Questions? Contact Robyn Davis at rldavis@uw.edu

Call for Comments: NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research

NIH’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) intended to gather broad public input on a revised definition of behavioral and social sciences research (BSSR). The definition, originally developed in 1996 and updated periodically since then, is available on the OBSSR website. The field has evolved significantly during the last two decades, and a more extensive update of the BSSR definition is needed to improve OBSSR’s and NIH’s ability to assess and monitor BSSR funding.

The OBSSR invites input from behavioral and social science researchers in academia and industry, health care professionals, patient advocates and advocacy organizations, scientific or professional organizations, federal agencies, and other interested members of the public.

The RFI is available here. To ensure consideration, input must be submitted by February 22, 2019. IdeaScale will also allow users to view and comment on others’ input.

Understanding the Correlation between Alzheimer’s Disease Polygenic Risk, Wealth, and the Composition of Wealth Holdings

Dean Lillard, Professor in the Department of Human Sciences at Ohio State University, explores whether people save differently when they have a greater or smaller polygenic risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease. The issue is salient for two principal reasons. First, the so-called Baby Boomers are rapidly aging into ranges at which people develop Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (hereafter ADRD). Second, social scientists increasingly use variation in genetic make-up of individuals to account for individual differences in social and economic behavior. This seminar is co-sponsored with the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance.

Spotlight on Neal Marquez, Fall 2018 Lightning Talks and Poster Session Winner

The Government of Turkey has prioritized integrating its more than 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees into Turkish society. How successful have they been in incorporating the refugees into the population? CSDE Trainee Neal Marquez presented research that addresses this question at the fall CSDE Lightning Talks and Poster Session, and received the award for best poster. He will also present this novel work in the Social Media and Population Processes Session at the PAA annual meeting this April and at the Data 4 Refugees (D4R) Challenge Workshop in Istanbul.

Neal and his collaborators, who include CSDE Affiliates Emilio Zagheni and Ott Toomet, utilized cell phone call detail record data from the Data 4 Refugees (D4R) Challenge as a novel way to estimate segregation in the usage of land space and the ways in which daily activities are segregated. These measures are more appropriate and less difficult to measure than traditional measures of residential segregation in the context of a rapidly shifting population. Neal also leverages digital Trace Data from the social media platform Twitter to measure sentiment toward refugees. They found that the probability that refugees contact non-refugees is greater in areas with more favorable tweets about refugees. They also found that refugees become more isolated over time and space where the sentiment is frequently negative.

Neal’s successful proposal to work with these data allowed him to spend last summer at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research as a Guest Researcher, working alongside Emilio Zagheni who is Director of the Institute, and demographers from across the globe. The Institute invites both graduate students and post-docs to apply for positions to work at this internationally renowned demographic institute.

Neal received an MPH at UW in Health Metrics and Evaluation. He is working toward a PhD in Sociology under the supervision of his advisor, CSDE Affiliate Adrian Raftery, and committee members, CSDE Affiliates Jonathan Wakefield and Emilio Zagheni. His dissertation will expand the current set of methodology used to estimate population processes in terms of both statistical methodologies and data sources.

In addition to his work with D4R, he is deriving a novel data likelihood function for evaluating spatial child mortality risk surfaces that is able to account for data collection processes that report at different levels of spatial aggregation. The goal of this work is to expand on both what we see as “demographic data” to estimate population processes, as well as how we incorporate statistical methodologies to accurately report on the uncertainty of the estimates. Neal and Jon Wakefield are applying this approach to data from the Dominican Republic.

In addition to this rich research agenda, Neal has already published more than six papers; most of them focus on mortality and health for the Global Burden of Disease Study.

CSDE Affiliate Ann Bostrom Elected to Board of Directors for the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Congratulations to CSDE Affiliate and CSDE Executive Committee Member, Ann Bostrom (Weyerhaeuser Endowed Professor in Environmental Policy, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance), who was just elected to the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science! The AAAS seeks to advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people. As an elected member of the Board, Ann looks forward to championing these efforts to democratize and advance science.

Leading Effective Class Discussions (Sociology Graduate Brownbag, 1/29/2019)

Please join us for a departmental teaching brownbag. We will be talking about how to lead effective class discussions, and we will kick things off with some insights from Callie Burt and Julie Brines. This is a welcoming and relaxed space where we can discuss the joys and challenges of teaching. Come share your tips, techniques, or questions. Feel free to bring your lunch.