Archives: Affiliates

Joan Casey is an environmental epidemiologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and Epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health. She received her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) in 2014, advised by Dr. Brian S. Schwartz. She holds a BS in Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University and an MA in Applied Physiology from Columbia University. She completed a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Postdoctoral Fellowship, where she had the opportunity to initiate ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations. She studies climate-related environmental challenges while considering the important role of social determinants of health, with the goal of informing policy decisions.

Jade d’Alpoim Guedes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Dr. D’Alpoim Guedes is an environmental archaeologist and ethnobiologist who employs an interdisciplinary research program to understand how humans adapted their foraging practices and agricultural strategies to new environments and have developed resilience in the face of climatic and social change. She employs a variety of different methodologies in her research including archaeobotany, paleoclimate reconstruction and computational modeling. Dr. d’Alpoim Guedes’ primary region of focus is Asia, where she has worked extensively in China, but also has interests in Nepal, Thailand and Pakistan. Dr. d’Alpoim Guedes also works closely with crop scientists to examine the potential of landraces of traditional crops such as millet, wheat, barley and buckwheat for modern agricultural systems.

Jing Xu is currently an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and completed postdoctoral work in developmental psychology at the University of Washington. Her work uses interdisciplinary and mixed methods approaches to examine child development and family wellbeing in diverse populations and cultural contexts. As an anthropologist and a developmental scientist, her research covers various lifestages and populations spanning multiple geographic regions and historical periods, i.e., contemporary China, America and Europe, Cold-War era Taiwan. Her latest project is relevant to migration studies, examining differences in developmental patterns across migrant and non-migrant families in three countries (The Republic of Congo, the U.S., and the UK).

Emily Godfrey is a University of Washington Professor of Family Medicine, with a joint appointment in UW Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology on the clinician-researcher track. She is a board-certified practicing family physician with fellowship training in family planning and reproductive health. With funding from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Society of Family Planning, industry and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), she has combined her background in primary care, public health and experience in clinical trials, observational studies, quality improvement, and patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) to build a robust research portfolio around women’s health issues. Since joining UW in 2012, she has secured funding as the principal investigator (PI) or Co-PI of a total of 18 grants and has 60 peer-reviewed publications in my focused area of investigation.

Aditya Ramesh joined the UW History Department in Winter 2024, from the University of Manchester, where he was a Presidential fellow in Environmental History. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His work revolves largely around environmental history, agrarian history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine in South Asia.

Kavita Dattani is a feminist researcher of digital technologies and data. Broadly, Kavita’s work seeks to uncover the ways in which data-driven digital technologies are enabling new forms of violence and marginality and the potentials for more progressive data futures.  Kavita’s research has spanned different kinds of data-driven technologies: Biometric and Financial Technologies, Digital Dating Apps, and Digital Labour Platforms.

Sasha Johfre is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and core faculty in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences at the University of Washington. Her research considers the creation and consequences of conceptual categories, including ways that human difference (e.g. based on gender, race, age, etc.) is seen as real and natural. Her overall goal is to create new conceptual and methodological tools that help people understand, interrogate, and intentionally engage in social processes. She is currently working on projects related to what I call the “natural-is-better cultural logic”; age as a socially constructed system of inequality; methods to more responsibly measure and interrogate social difference; and the intersectionality of interpersonal perception of social categories.

Erin McElroy is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. McElroy’s work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, digitality, empire, and racial capitalism in the US and in Romania, alongside housing justice organizing, countermapping, and transnational solidarities. This informs the focus of their manuscript, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, forthcoming with Duke University Press. McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, software, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. Recently the collective published Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance. Commitments to public scholarship also informs McElroy’s work coediting the Radical Housing Journal—an open access publication that foregrounds housing research and organizing transnationally. At UW, McElroy runs the Anti-Eviction Lab, where much of the student and community partner driven research focuses upon Landlord Tech Watch—a platform dedicated to producing collective knowledge about landlord-driven data grabbing and algorithmic techniques.

Lesley Steinman is a Research Scientist in the UW School of Public Health’s (SPH) Department of Health Systems and Population Health, based at a community-academic CDC-funded Prevention Research Center. For the past 20 years, she has partnered with diverse stakeholders (community members, practitioners, organizations, policymakers) to conduct community-engaged research and practice to improve health promotion and disease prevention and management for populations facing inequities in access to quality care and health outcomes. Much of this collaborative work has focused on disseminating, adapting, implementing, scaling, and sustaining the PEARLS program, a home/community-based collaborative care model that builds capacity among front-line social service providers to improve depression care access and outcomes among historically marginalized older adults, including low-income older communities of color, linguistically diverse communities, and rural communities.

 

She recently led and conducted several studies that align well with our proposed 2024-2029 Core Center activities and ALMA Core Research Project – the PEARLS Connect Study to evaluate the effectiveness, moderators, and mechanisms for action of PEARLS as a social connectedness intervention, and a case study of PEARLS delivered via promotoras to understand adaptations, implementation determinants, and effectiveness for older Spanish-speaking Mexican-American adults. Both of these studies were done in partnership with community-based social service organizations reaching older adults often underserved by care. In addition, the current Core Research Project (PEARLS Equity) is a dissemination and implementation (D&I) study partnering with funders and community-based organizations to create and test new dissemination and implementation strategies and tools that align with organizations and practitioners’ values, beliefs and needs. For the proposed project, she will draw on these experiences to lead the dissemination and translation arm of Core Center and the dissemination aim of the Core Research Project, partnering with HPRC students, staff and faculty and community partners to co-design and carry out project activities. Lesley brings a range of community-engaged D&I research and practice methods; health equity, mental health, social connectedness subject matter expertise; and is an experienced trainer, partner, and practice coach translating research into practice.

Aja Sutton is an alumna of the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. During the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 academic years, she was a TADA-BSSR NIH T32 Fellowship in Data Science and Demography Trainee through the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and was mentored by Zack Almquist and Jon Wakefield. She is also the Managing Editor for the Population Dynamics Lab. Her work integrates computational social science, geography, human health data, and disease ecology. Her dissertation delineated aspects of the political ecology of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. It aimed to clarify the relationships between political actors, messaging, identity, and polarization; and to identify the roles these have had in driving the population-level response to COVID-19 and uptake of transmission interventions such as mask-wearing across space and time.

She is interested in improving the ways public health practitioners and policymakers can understand and work with communities to better prepare for major health emergency response. Ultimately, her doctoral research goals were to provide a clearer context of how and why our new political ecologic landscapes inform public interactions with emergency public health advice and policy, and what can be done in amid a highly dynamic sociopolitical climate.

Aja is also trained as an human osteoarchaeologist (bioarchaeologist) with a specialty in the study of ancient diseases and the life course in past populations; and as a historian focused on the social history of health, the human body, and the politics of leisure and physical display in Western Europe and settler North America.

Currently, Aja is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Human Evolutionary Ecology and Health Lab (Dr. James Holland Jones) in the Department of Earth System Science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford University. There, she will be helping to develop the next generation of epidemiologic modeling methods.