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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Ryan Gabriel Explores Gender, Residential Mobility, and Neighborhood Attainment of Black-White Couples

How does the race and gender combination of mixed-race couples influence the location they make their home? CSDE Fellow Ryan Gabriel explores this question in his recent publication, Gender and the Residential Mobility and Neighborhood Attainment of Black-White Couples. His article, published in this month’s issue of Demography, examines how the racial hierarchy within the United States impacts the mobility of black-white couples. His research found that the race of the male partner typically aligned with the racial composition of the neighborhood where the couple resides.

Join us at the CSDE PAA Reception on 4/27!

CSDE fellows, students, affiliates, alumni, supporters, and friends,

Please join us at the 2018 CSDE PAA Reception on Friday, April 27th from 6-9pm at Denver Dazzle! Enjoy drinks and light fare and connect with fellow demographers in the CSDE community. Add the event to your calendar here.

We hope to see you there!

Allen School Colloquium: Data Science for Human Well-being

SPEAKER:   Tim Althoff, Stanford University

TITLE:     Data Science for Human Well-being

DATE:      Tuesday, April 17, 2018

TIME:      3:30 pm

PLACE:     EEB-105

HOST:      James Fogarty

ABSTRACT

The popularity of wearable and mobile devices, including smartphones and smartwatches, has generated an explosion of detailed behavioral data. These massive digital traces provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to realize new types of scientific approaches that provide novel insights about our lives, health, and happiness. However, gaining valuable insights from these data requires new computational approaches that turn observational, scientifically “weak” data into strong scientific results and can computationally test domain theories at scale.

 In this talk, I will describe novel computational methods that leverage digital activity traces at the scale of billions of actions taken by millions of people. These methods combine insights from data mining, social network analysis, and natural language processing to generate actionable insights about our physical and mental well-being. Specifically, I will describe how massive digital activity traces reveal unknown health inequality around the world, and how personalized predictive models can target personalized interventions to combat this inequality. I will demonstrate that modelling how fast we are using search engines enables new types of insights into sleep and cognitive performance. Further, I will describe how natural language processing methods can help improve counseling services for millions of people in crisis.

I will conclude the talk by sketching interesting future directions for computational approaches that leverage digital activity traces to better understand and improve human well-being.

Bio

Tim Althoff is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science in the Infolab at Stanford University, advised by Jure Leskovec. His research advances computational methods to improve human well-being, combining techniques from Data Mining, Social Network Analysis, and Natural Language Processing. Prior to his PhD, Tim obtained M.S. and B.S. degrees from Stanford University and University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He has received several fellowships and awards including the SAP Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Fulbright scholarship, German Academic Exchange Service scholarship, the German National Merit Foundation scholarship, and a Best Paper Award by the International Medical Informatics Association. Tim’s research has been covered internationally by news outlets including BBC, CNN, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

 Refreshments to be served in room prior to talk.

*NOTE* This lecture will be broadcast live via the Internet. See http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/colloq.info.html for more information.

Email: talk-info@cs.washington.edu

Info: http://www.cs.washington.edu/

(206) 543-1695

The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accomodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities.

To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance of the event at: (206) 543-6450/V,

(206) 543-6452/TTY, (206) 685-7264 (FAX), or email at dso@u.washington.edu.

Gates Foundation Grant Opportunities

Grand Challenges Explorations grant opportunities

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is inviting Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) proposals for the following three challenges (application deadline is May 2, 2018):

GCE grants have already been awarded to more than 1300 researchers in more than 65 countries. Initial grants are for USD $100,000 and successful projects are eligible to receive follow-on funding of up to USD $1 million. Proposals are solicited twice a year for an expanding set of global health and development challenges. Applications are only two pages, and no preliminary data is required. Applicants can be at any experience level; in any discipline; and from any type of organization, including colleges and universities, government laboratories, research institutions, non-profit organizations and for-profit companies.

Grand Challenges grant opportunities

Additional global funder grant opportunities

  • The African Academy of Sciences (AAS), the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are partnering under the auspices of the Coalition of African Research & Innovation (CARI) to establish a post-doctoral training fellowship program, the African Postdoctoral Training Initiative (APTI). Training will be at the intramural laboratories of NIH. Application deadline is May 11, 2018.
  • The Templeton World Charity Foundation announces Round 1 of its new Global Innovations for Character Development initiative. Application deadline is June 15, 2018.

Blog series on innovation: Trevor Mundel, the Gates Foundation’s President of Global Health, recently published three new blogs in his series on innovation: one on metabolic markers for gestational age assessment, one on surveying nutrient levels in breastmilk, and one on new technology to assess intestinal health in babies.

We look forward to receiving innovative ideas from around the world on the open grant opportunities listed above. If you have a great idea, please apply. If you know someone else who has a great idea, please forward this message. And we invite you to explore an interactive world map of ideas funded to date across the global Grand Challenges network.

Thank you for your commitment to solving the world’s greatest health and development challenges.

U.S. Census Bureau Employment Information Sessions (at PAA Annual Meeting, 4/26-4/27/18)

The U.S. Census Bureau is interested in meeting with qualified U.S. citizens with education and expertise in demography, sociology, economics, geography, and related social sciences.  Training in demographic analysis, survey research, geographic information systems, and/or quantitative data analysis of large datasets is preferred.  U.S. Census Bureau employees work on topics such as: population distribution; population estimates and projections; race and ethnicity; international technical assistance; housing; socio-economic characteristics; employment; disability; health insurance coverage; and migration.

Representatives will meet with those interested in careers at the U.S. Census Bureau during the Population Association of America (PAA) annual meeting in Denver, CO.  We will conduct half hour informational sessions on April 26 and April 27 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm in Tower Court B.  Please email David Zaslow (David.C.Zaslow@census.gov) to sign up prior to the conference or visit the Census Bureau’s exhibition booth during the conference for any remaining time slots.  Please share this invitation with all interested individuals.

Applicants should apply for employment opportunities at www.usajobs.gov.  It is helpful to set up an account on the site, then to create a saved search on the word “Census”, to receive an email notification the day after a job opportunity appears.

Two job announcements on USAJobs.gov will coincide with the conference.  A job announcement will appear for Recent Graduates (who graduated in the last two years).  Those with whom we meet in Tower Court B will be able to apply with assistance from Census representatives.  Others will be able to apply on USAJobs.gov on the following Monday and Tuesday, April 30 and May 1.  There also will be a job announcement for career-conditional job opportunities that will appear on USAJobs.gov in late April.

The Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau are Equal Opportunity Employers and encourage applicants from all sources.

NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowships

The Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) offers Postdoctoral Research Fellowships to encourage independence early in the Fellow’s career through supporting his or her research and training goals. The research and training plan of each Fellowship must address important scientific questions within the scope of the SBE Directorate and the specific guidelines in this solicitation. The SPRF program offers two tracks: (I) Fundamental Research in the SBE Sciences (SPRF-FR) and (II) Broadening Participation in the SBE Sciences (SPRF-BP). See the full text of the solicitation at the link below for a detailed description of these tracks.

Using the NLSY for Your Research (at PAA Annual Meeting, 4/25/18)

Deborah Carr (PI of the NLSY79) and Elizabeth Cooksey (PI of the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult studies) will provide an overview to the NLSY79 (including the NLSY Child and Young Adult surveys) and the NLSY97, present information on data updates and future survey directions, and show new and returning users how to search through the thousands of variables and download data into SPSS, SAS, STATA and R.

If you are interested in any life course stages from childhood to “early” aging, we have longitudinal data for you! The NLSY79 has tracked respondents for nearly 40 years, and the oldest respondents recently turned 60, while NLSY97 respondents have been tracked for more than 20 years, are now in their thirties. See www.nlsinfo.org

The session will take place from 3-5pm on WEDNESDAY APRIL 25. This is a member initiated meeting, and is FREE of charge.

There is no need to reserve a place, but if you do plan to attend, it would be helpful if you could just email Elizabeth at cooksey.1@osu.edu.

Call for Applications: GeoHackweek

The University of Washington’s eScience Institute is hosting a GeoHackweek, Sept 10 – 14, 2018. Join us for five days of tutorials, data exploration, software development and community networking, focused on open source tools to analyze and visualize geospatial data. Our event will include instructors from academia and industry across many different geospatial disciplines.

Please visit our website for details on how to apply.

CSDE Biomarker Working Group: Adding Genomics Your Study

Adding genomics your study — Methods Measuring the Transcriptome, Epigenome, and Microbiome

Noah Snyder-Mackler, Assistant Professor, UW Psychology

The Biomarker Working Group provides a forum for informal discussions of practical and theoretical issues associated with collecting and using biomarker data in social and behavioral science research. Light refreshments will be served, and everyone is welcome to attend.

 

Those who would like to receive regular meeting announcements by email may subscribe to the mailing list here:  http://mailman.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/biomarker_group

CSDE Fellows Awarded for 2018-19

The CSDE Training Committee is pleased to announce the 2018-2019 CSDE Fellows, Christine Leibbrand  and Hilary Wething. Christine and Hilary have received the CSDE Fellowship funded by the Shanahan Endowment.

The CSDE Fellowship provides tuition, a stipend, health insurance and other benefits. Nineteen applications were submitted from the Departments of Anthropology, Epidemiology, Geography, Sociology, and Statistics, the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance and the School of Social Work.

Christine is a fifth year graduate student and PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology, with a concentration in Social Statistics. She received an MA in Sociology in 2015 and the Demographic Methods Certificate in 2017. Her primary research areas are “Migration and Settlements” and “Wellbeing of Families and Households”. Christine’s dissertation addresses the overlooked question of how race/ethnicity and gender moderate the relationship between internal migration and changes in the social and economic conditions of individuals. She is conducting a multi-level analysis of changes in patterns of migration in the US, combining data from the two National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth with contextual data from several other sources. Christine is collaborating with her dissertation advisor and Fellowship mentor Stewart Tolnay, S. Frank Miyamoto Professor Emeritus of Sociology, and demographers at the University of Michigan and the Census Bureau on an innovative multigenerational study of the Great Migration in the 1940’s. This research will demonstrate whether the children of the Great Migration migrants experienced better life outcomes than the children of those who did not migrate, supporting what is believed to be a primary motivation in moving from the South to the North. Christine and her collaborators are examining the relationship between the contemporary social, economic and health well-being, neighborhood attainment, and migration patterns of adults, and the migration behavior of their parents during the period of the Great Migration. One paper from this project has recently been published in Demography. Christine conducts analyses of this novel confidential dataset that links individuals between the 1940 and 2000 U.S. Censuses, and the individuals to the Social Security Death Index, Social Security disability records, and Internal Revenue Service records at the Northwest Federal Statistical Research Data Center (NWFSRDC), a CSDE partner research center. During the fellowship, Christine will also continue to conduct innovative research on residential segregation and mobility in collaborations with Kyle Crowder, Blumstein-Jordan Professor of Sociology, and current CSDE Trainees and alumni.

Hilary is a fourth year graduate student and PhD Candidate in Public Policy and Management in the Evans School, with a concentration in Social Statistics. She received an MS in Public Policy and Management Autumn 2016. Hilary is working toward the completion of the Demographic Methods Certificate Program. Hilary’s primary research area is the “Wellbeing of Families and Households”. Prior to enrolling at UW, Hilary was a research assistant at the Economic Policy Institute (Washington, D.C.), where her work appeared in The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets. Hilary is a member of The Minimum Wage Study research team who are analyzing the impact of the minimum wage ordinance in Seattle. This research will provide insights for policy makers considering ordinances in other metropolitan regions and states. Hilary’s dissertation examines how labor regulations affect employment, specifically how local employment public policy may affect the earnings volatility of workers using a quasi-experimental research design. Hilary estimated the impact of Seattle’s Paid Sick and Safe Time Ordinance on the quarterly wages, hours worked, employment, earnings, job turnover, and earnings volatility of all affected workers in Seattle, relative to unaffected workers in Seattle and in other regions of Washington State. This program evaluation is vital to policy discourse because numerous localities and states are enacting paid sick leave laws without evidence of how these policies affect workers. Drawing on administrative data on unemployment insurance from the Washington State Unemployment Insurance program, obtained through an intra-state agreement between UW and the Washington State Employment Security Department, Hilary identifies the employment characteristics that are associated with earnings volatility, including wage rates, hours worked and job churning, and decomposes the volatility into within-job volatility and between-job volatility. This is critical for understanding worker welfare. Increased between-job volatility for individuals who are also increasing their earnings is indicative of improved welfare. However, increased within job volatility at a constant earnings level or increased volatility among people less likely to maintain employment would be welfare detracting to the worker. Hilary is also collaborating with her Dissertation Advisor and Fellowship Mentor, Heather Hill, and others on economic instability. In collaboration with CSDE Affiliate, Jennifer Romich, and others, they recently published the paper, “An Introduction to Household Economic Instability and Social Policy” in Social Service Review.

Congratulations to Christine and Hilary!

The Training Committee would also like to acknowledge the other outstanding fellowship applicants and the CSDE Affiliate mentors who have supported their students’ innovative research and access to unique data. We hope to be able to offer a greater number of fellowships in the future, because there were many worthy applications.