On 4/16 from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST, CDWG will host Dr. Jordan Klein for a research talk. Jordan Klein is a demographer, social epidemiologist, and quantitative and computational social scientist working as a research scientist in the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research’s Department of Digital and Computational Demography, joint appointed in the laboratories of Population Dynamics and Sustainable Wellbeing, and Migration and Mobility. He earned his PhD from Princeton University’s Office of Population Research, specializing in international comparative epidemiology and computational demography. His current work focuses on understanding the drivers of the spatio-temporal evolution of mortality disparities, especially in emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases.

Title: Must whatever goes up come down? Social gradients in the emergence of Covid-19

Disentangling the roles of disease-specific interventions and disease-agnostic pre-existing inequities in the production of COVID-19 mortality gradients remains an empirical challenge due to the lack of counterfactual evidence from a scenario in which no interventions were implemented in response to the pandemic. To address this knowledge gap, I create a mechanistic epidemiological model simulating the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, the first model of its type incorporating novel theoretical frameworks of the pathways that contribute to social gradients in emerging infectious disease mortality and the first of the spatiotemporal dynamics of COVID-19 mortality gradients in Brazil that is geospatially explicit, on a national scale, and uses real-world data-informed parameters. I incorporate pre-existing inequities in living conditions and in health status and healthcare access/quality, and examine the potential roles of two types of interventions: vaccination and social distancing, using different sources of digital trace data to parameterize reductions in mobility. I consider counterfactual scenarios of intervention adoption, comparing different prioritization strategies with respect to socioeconomic status to real-world adoption patterns. I find that strategies which prioritize lower socioeconomic status geographies, especially for vaccination, could have successfully counteracted the effects of pre-existing inequities in living conditions and in health status and healthcare access/quality, even with a limited supply of vaccines. These findings have crucial implications for informing policy responses to prevent mortality disparities in future emerging infectious disease epidemics and pandemics.

CDWG Will be Hybrid in the Spring Quarter of 2025. During this talk, Dr. Klein will join us via zoom with the UW group meeting in Raitt 223.

 

Zoom Registration is here.

Room: Raitt 223 – The Demography lab

CSDE is thrilled to announce the inaugural Charles and Josephine Hirschman Award for student research. CSDE students may apply for up to $2,000 in funds to directly support a research project. Funds may support activities such as the cost of conducting fieldwork, data purchases, the hiring of a translator or transcriber, or participant rewards in surveys. Be creative! All funds must be spent during the 2025-26 academic year and may not be used to pay tuition or your own salary. See details on eligibility and review criteria below.

Each applicant must provide

• a 1-2 page research proposal,

• a budget from the provided template, and

• their CV.

Apply here. A faculty advisor must approve of your application via this form.

Applications are due Friday, April 18, 2025.

Eligibility: Applicants must by UW graduate students who are affiliated with CSDE in at least one of the following ways:

1) are a current or former CSDE T32 fellow,

2) are currently enrolled at the UW and in the Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods,

3) are currently enrolled at the UW and have completed the Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods, or

4) are currently enrolled at the UW and have taken at least one of the following courses: of CSDE 513 or CSDE 533.

Applications will not be accepted without approval from a faculty mentor.

If awarded, funding is contingent upon proof of IRB approval or proof that the project is deemed not human subjects research.

Review Criteria: The Award Committee will review applications according to the NIH’s review criteria of significance, approach, innovation, investigators, and environment, as well as the impact of the award on your own personal research and professional goals. Our rubric contains more information.

When: Friday, April 18, 2025 (12:30-1:30PM)

Where: 360 Parrington Hall and on Zoom (register here)

1-on-1 meetings: 223 Raitt Hall (sign up here)

We are looking forward to hosting Daniel Parker from the University of California – Irvine on Friday, April 18 in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative. In addition, there are opportunities to meet 1-1 with Dr. Parker throughout the day. Sign up here!

Quantifying armed conflict is challenging, as traditional conflict data often rely on incomplete reporting and typically focus on metrics like the number of airstrikes. However, these measures overlook critical factors such as infrastructure destruction, population displacement, and recovery. In this talk, I’ll discuss how my group has been using satellite-based nighttime lights (NTL) data as a scalable tool for tracking conflict intensity and its downstream effects on public health. Using case studies from Yemen and Ukraine, I’ll show that airstrikes lead to significant declines in NTL, with notable geographic and temporal variation in post-attack recovery. In Yemen, I’ll further demonstrate how NTL can help assess the impact of armed conflict on cholera incidence, providing a means to quantify associations between conflict intensity, infrastructure disruption, and disease risk. The analysis highlights how both the magnitude of conflict and the pace of recovery shape cholera incidence. This approach provides an objective, real-time method for evaluating the cascading effects of conflict on infrastructure and health, with critical implications for humanitarian response and global public health.

Dr. Daniel M. Parker is trained in anthropology and demography and considers himself a spatial epidemiologist and medical geographer. He works on infectious diseases, human movement and travel patterns, and spatial interventions, particularly in under-resourced and conflict-affected regions. His research integrates geographic information systems (GIS), Earth observation data, molecular epidemiology, and statistical modeling to examine disease transmission and barriers to healthcare. He has led large-scale geographic reconnaissance efforts for malaria interventions in Eastern Myanmar; worked on vector-borne disease ecology in Asia, East Africa, and the U.S.A.; and conducted research on displaced populations’ access to healthcare. Through collaborations with NGOs, governments, and academic institutions, his work directly informs scalable public health interventions, using geospatial technologies to analyze mobility patterns, model disease distributions across space and time, and improve healthcare delivery in vulnerable populations.

Household waste disposal practices such as dumping in public spaces and burning waste at home can create severe environmental threats. In a recent article published in Growth and Change, CSDE Affiliate Dafeng Xu (Evans School) and a co-author present evidence on the factors affecting household waste disposal in Nigeria using national survey data.  The study finds that state-level specific waste management authorities are positively associated with sustainable waste disposal practices, conditional on household socioeconomic status, and that this positive association between waste management authorities and sustainable waste disposal is largely absorbed after controlling for regional GDP or GDP per capita. Waste management authorities also play a significant role in influencing waste disposal practices only in states with relatively low levels of GDP (or GDP per capita) – and one important function of these specific waste management authorities is to lower the waste collection fee, so that households in some states would be more able and willing to dispose of waste sustainably. Read the full study here.

The U.S. Census Bureau collects demographic data every ten years, including sex, age, race, and household relationships. Individuals who disclose changes in recorded sex across censuses could be identified in reconstruction-based linkage attacks. In a recent study published in the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, CSDE Affiliate Abraham Flaxman (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) and doctoral student Os Keyes (Human Centered Design & Engineering) explored the effectiveness of the Census Bureau’s TopDown approach to disclosure avoidance, finding that it led to a 30 percent decrease in these attacks when compared to previous approaches. Read the full study here.

In the last five years, about 20 U.S. states have passed laws authorizing the use of cameras in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. CSDE Affiliate Clara Berridge’s (Social Work) socio-legal analysis and survey research about cameras in these facilities were both cited in a recent New York Times article on the issue. She states that she views camera as “a symptom, not a solution,” which provides a Band-Aid for residents who have someone to surveil their care but can distract from the work of ensuring quality long-term care for everyone. Read the full article here.