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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Panel on Youth Violence

“Social Disadvantage, Cognitive Schemas, and Propensities to Violence: An Evolutionary Developmental Perspective” — Callie Burt
“Youth and Gun Violence: Can We Save Lives?” — Ali Rowhani-Rahbar
“Risk and protective factors, and effective prevention programs for youth violence: Next Steps” — Richard Catalano, Jr

Callie Burt‘s research interests include children, youth, and families; criminology, deviance, and social control; health disparities; life course; race and ethnicity; social psychology; social stratification/inequality; and biopsychosociology.

Dr. Ali Rowhani-Rahbar joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 2012. His substantive area of research is violence epidemiology with a focus on trauma-crime nexus to inform interventions that promote healing and prevent recidivism. He investigates violence victimization and perpetration with an integrated public health and public safety approach. He has been involved in studies of violent injury and crime before and after firearm-related hospitalization, interventions to promote safe gun storage, firearm access in relation to mental illness, and influences of policies on firearm injury. He is currently the Principal Investigator of a cluster randomized trial of a dual hospital-based and community-based intervention to improve the health and well-being of gunshot wound victims. He has served on the American College of Emergency Physicians Technical Advisory Group on Firearm Violence Research, and the Firearms Subcommittee of Washington State Safer Homes Task Force for Suicide Prevention. Methodologically, he has contributed to the field of injury prevention and control by examining the epidemiology of traumatic brain injury, drowning, burns, adverse events following medical interventions, and a number of other traumatic outcomes. Dr. Rowhani-Rahbar is a Core Investigator, the Leader of the Violence Prevention Section, and the Director of the Research Methods Core at the Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center. He is also an Affiliate Investigator at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and an editor for the journal Injury Prevention.

Dr. Richard F. Catalano is Professor and the Director of the Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work and adjunct Professor of Education and Sociology. For over 25 years, he has led research focused on discovering risk and protective factors for positive and problem behavior, designing and evaluating programs to address these factors, using this knowledge on etiology and efficacy to understand and improve prevention services systems. He is the co-developer of the Social Development Model, a theory of antisocial behavior. He is also the co-developer of the parenting programs “Guiding Good Choices,” “Supporting School Success,” and “Parents Who Care,” of the school-based program, “Raising Healthy Children,” and of the community prevention approach, ‘Communities That Care.’ He has published over 200 articles and book chapters. His work has been recognized by practitioners (1996 National Prevention Network’s Award of Excellence); criminologists (2007 August Vollmer Award by the American Society of Criminology, 2003 Paul Tappan Award from the Western Society of Criminology, and Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology); and prevention scientists (2001 Prevention Science Award from the Society for Prevention Research).

Ali Rowhani-Rahbar appointed Bartely Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence

Congratulations to Affiliate Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, who was recently appointed to the Bartley Dobb Professorship for the Study and Prevention of Violence.  The current holder of this professorship is fellow Affiliate Richard Catalano. Established in 1997, this five-year endowment funds an appointed University of Washington (UW) faculty member for their work in the study and prevention of violence through resolution of conflict.

“I am honored and thrilled,” said Rowhani-Rahbar. “This professorship catalyzes our scholarship to study violence and enables us to design and evaluate new violence prevention programs. It provides invaluable support for our work to reduce the heavy burden of violence in our society.”

Geography Hackathon (4/28-4/29)

The Department of Geography will host a geography-themed hackathon event on April 28-29th in Denny Hall, room 303. The event, MapHacks, will bring UW students from all disciplines and departments together to apply their backgrounds in Web mapping and GIS using a wide variety of platforms, including MapBox, Carto, Tableau, QGIS, and PostgreSQL/PostGIS.

MapHacks will be held over the course of the weekend. On the first day, participants will form teams based on common interests within the overall theme of urban development issues. Projects will include topics such as LINK expansion, building construction, accessibility and safety, affordability, growth management, homelessness, traffic congestion, cycling routes, bike and car share programs. The outcome of each team’s project will be some form of visualization that incorporates concepts such as location, distance, space, spatial patterns, scale, or nature/society relations.

Most of the first day will be spent developing and carrying out projects, as well as tech talks by representatives from industry sponsors, which include Spatial Dev, a local GIS firm founded by a UW Geography alum. The second day will be devoted to the presentation of group projects, judging, and awarding prizes.

The event is being organized by geography majors Utako Kase and Ariel Kadouri along with Brent Gruenke, major in Human-Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) with help and guidance from Geography professor Luke Bergmann. MapHacks is co-sponsored by the Departments of Geography and HCDE, along with industry partners.

Registration is free, first come, first served, and is limited to 80 students. Click here to visit the event page and register.

CSDE Collaborates on the McCabe & Heerwig Policy Brief

CSDE recently collaborated with Jennifer Heerwig, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University, and Brian McCabe, Associate Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and Visiting Scholar a University of Washington, on a policy brief that assesses the impact of Seattle’s Democracy Voucher Program. This policy brief is a foray into a new area for CSDE.

The Democracy Voucher program launched in 2017 to reshape how municipal elections are funded. The brief examines how the program has expanded participation in municipal elections, and whether voucher participants voted at higher rates. You can read the full policy brief below.

Population Health Graduate Student Conference Travel Awards

The Population Health Initiative is again offering graduate student travel awards of up to $1,500 each to further students’ academic, research, or professional goals as they strive to become the next generation of leaders in population health. The application period for this round of funding closes on Wednesday, April 25, 2018 (11:59 p.m. Pacific). Applicants must be nominated by a faculty member.

Learn more by visiting the Population Health Initiative’s funding page: http://www.washington.edu/populationhealth/resources/funding-and-awards/.

 

Team Up with Data Visualization Students to Advance Your Research

More than 80 students are currently studying Data Visualization in CSE 512, and will spend the latter half of the quarter developing final projects. Each year, many of the best projects result from partnerships with researchers across campus.

  • Do you have interesting data analysis or communication challenges that you’d like to see visualization students address?
  • Can it be well scoped to a ~5 week project?
  • Are you (or a research assistant) willing to help provide a bit of guidance and feedback?

If so, please complete this form: https://goo.gl/forms/E39QwmWDAMZfElhl1

The course staff will review the proposals and then work with a selected subset to create a suggested “shortlist”. The goal is to identify promising projects and improve the odds of getting students to work on them. We’d love to receive project descriptions as soon as possible, ideally within the next week or two. Please submit by Friday, April 20!

LINKS Center Summer Workshop (6/4-6/8)

The 2018 LINKS Center workshop on social network analysis will be held June 4 through June 8, at the University of Kentucky. Registration opened March 30 and closes May 15.
The annual LINKS Center summer workshop provides training in social network analysis (SNA) at both beginner’s and more advanced levels, across multiple social science disciplines. The workshop is taught by a team of instructors, including Filip Agneessens, Steve Borgatti, Dan Brass, Ron Burt, Alan Daly, Rich DeJordy, Joe Ferrare, Dan Halgin, Jeff Johnson, David Krackhardt, Joe Labianca, Ajay Mehra, Brea Perry, Andy Pilny, Scott Poole, Scott Soltis, and Tom Valente. In addition, a large number of experienced TAs ensure that all participants can get individual attention.

Debra Friedman Memorial Lecture (4/26/18)

Thursday, April 26, 2018
Featured speaker: Carl C. Anthony Co-Founder of the Breakthrough Communities Project, and Visiting Professor at The Center for Regional Change, UC Davis
6 – 7 p.m.
University of Washington Tacoma, William Philip Hall, 1918 Pacific Avenue, Tacoma

Carl Anthony is an architect, regional planner, environmental justice pioneer, and a committed social activist. As the founding director of one of the nation’s first environmental justice organizations, Urban Habitat, he led efforts to prod mainstream environmental movements to confront issues of race and class and to understand the dynamic intersections between them. Carl founded and edited the journal Race, Poverty, and the Environment. He led the Ford Foundation’s Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative and is the co-founder/co-director of the Breakthrough Communities Project, empowering grassroots communities  in metropolitan areas and supporting multiracial leadership. As the sole African American architecture student at Columbia University in the 1960s, Carl recognized the contradictions of the profession and sought ways to change it. During those student years he kick-started the national Conversation on Regional Equity (CORE), a dialogue that brought national policy experts and advocates together to consider how to bring about metropolitan racial justice.

Carl has taught at Columbia, UC Berkeley, Harvard’s Kennedy School, and is currently visiting faculty at UC Davis’ Center for Regional Change. He has published widely and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Trailblazer Award from the Sierra Club, UC Davis Community Engagement Award, and the Duveneck Humanitarian Award. His work has influenced the lives of thousands of American communities.

Assistant or Associate Professor – focused on Racism and Health

The School of Public Health at the University of Washington (UW) seeks one or two full-time, tenure-eligible faculty with a research focus on the impacts of racism, discrimination and other social inequalities on health. These positions would be in the Department of Health Services and/or the Department of Epidemiology at the Assistant or Associate Professor rank and based on a 12 month service period with an anticipated start date in fall 2018. The interests and qualifications of the successful candidate will determine in which department (Health Services or Epidemiology) the candidate will be primarily appointed. A joint or adjunct appointment may be considered with other UW departments or affiliated institutions.

The successful candidate is expected to lead scholarship around issues of racism, social justice and health, and will include a prominent role in a Center for Anti-Racism and Community Health focused on these themes. Few schools of public health are dedicated to tackling issues of race and social justice in a concerted manner, with community partners, and using rigorous methods across a variety of disciplines. We anticipate the successful candidate to lead efforts in conducting such research while also remaining committed to developing a cadre of public health advocates, practitioners and researchers equipped to identify and challenge systems and structures of racism and oppression. Importantly, the candidate must also be dedicated to building the pipeline of future scholars interested in defining and disrupting systems of structural racism and recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty.

We are looking for individuals with a DrPH or PhD degree or equivalent in public health or a related discipline, including but not limited to health services, epidemiology, health behavior, health policy, anthropology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, demography, economics, geography, political science, social work, and sociology. We are especially interested in candidates with scholarly work around racism and related constructs as they impact health of populations nationally and globally.

Assistant Professor, Sociology

The School of Science and Humanities at Husson University invites applications for a full-time, ranked faculty position in Sociology to begin in fall 2018. This full-time position requires a candidate with a record of demonstrated effective teaching of General Education classes in Sociology and Cultural Anthropology. In addition to this experience, the ideal candidate will have demonstrated experience developing and teaching online courses; developing and deploying assessment of student learning outcomes and curricula. The ideal candidate will have an active research agenda and provide evidence of research potential.

Husson University is a private institution of approximately 3500 undergraduate and graduate students located in Bangor, Maine. The University is dedicated to offering premier professional programs designed to maximize experiential learning opportunities and student success. Bangor has been ranked as one of the top 50 small cities in the U.S. It offers a safe, affordable community with excellent education and health care, easy access to major urban centers, and a wealth of outdoor recreation opportunities. Year round activities can be enjoyed on the numerous lakes, trails, and ski areas. The University is approximately 40 minutes from the Maine coast and the nearby mountains of Acadia National Park.