Topics in Digital and Computational Demography
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- Date: 3-7 November 2025
- Coordinator: Risto Conte Keivabu
- Instructors: Boris Barron, Irena Chen, Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Risto Conte Keivabu, Jordan Klein, Ebru Sanlitürk, Benjamin-Samuel Schlueter, Tom Theile, Emilio Zagheni
- Application deadline: 28 September 2025
The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is offering a new edition of its open course on Topics in Digital and Computational Demography (3-7 November 2025) and encourages qualified candidates to apply.
This year, topics include:
- Introduction to Digital and Computational Demography; Approaches for combining representative data and non-probabilistic samples; Identifying sources of bias in digital trace data and adjusting for them. In the practice session, we will scrape websites with R and then access web-APIs from OpenAI with R.
- Digital trace data for migration research: Introduction to migration theories and ethics of digital data use; Fundaments of data collection and analysis of digital trace data; Advantages and critical challenges of using different types of digital trace data, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Trends, Wikipedia, and Bibliometric data.
- Introduction to geospatial and environmental data; Working with geospatial data in R; Advantages and pitfalls of available open data on the environment; Working with open geospatial and environmental data; Handling of environmental data for demographic research; Introducing a geospatial component to migration/mobility data.
- Simulations in the social sciences; Formulating assumptions into empirical tests; Loss functions for performance evaluation; Ordinary differential equations in modeling contexts; Empirical vs mechanistic models; Verifying and calibrating models.
- Bayesian approaches with applications to demography, Introduction to Bayes (comparison to frequentist statistics) including Bayes rule; implementation of MCMC algorithms (HMC, Gibbs), interpretation of results (credible intervals, posterior distributions) and model diagnostics; mortality models; methods for estimation issues in demography (missing data, small area estimation, multiple data sources).
The course will be offered in a hybrid format: in-person for students in the IMPRS-PHDS network who are already in Rostock; online (via Zoom) for everyone else.
How to apply
For more information and application instructions, please see the detailed course description.
To apply, please complete this form.
The deadline for applications is 28 September 2025. Applicants will be informed of their admission by 8 October 2025.
If you have any questions, reach out to phds@demogr.mpg.de
The Office of Research invites applications for the next round of the Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grant program. Proposals are due to RRF Monday, September 29, by 5:00 PM. Departments and Colleges/Schools may have earlier deadlines, so all applicants are advised to check with their program’s administrative staff. Awards will be announced by January 15, 2026.
The purpose of the RRF is to advance new directions in faculty research and contribute in substantive ways to the health, creativity, and productivity of the research ecosystem as defined by the University’s Vision Statement: “We discover timely solutions to the world’s most complex problems and enrich the lives of people throughout our community, the state of Washington, the nation, and the world.”
The RRF received a Public Records Request in June. The RRF team is responding to the request following UW guidelines. RRF Website.
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 the development of a new technology.
Submissions from all disciplines are welcome, with budgets up to $40,000, and will be peer reviewed through one of four RRF Review Committees:
- Arts and Humanities
- Social and Behavioral Sciences
- Basic Biological and Biomedical Sciences
- Physical Sciences and Engineering
Please submit your proposal to be reviewed in the research area that most closely matches your project, which might not necessarily match your home department. Project teams that review and follow all the instructions have a greater chance of funding.
- Faculty eligibility is now limited to Assistant and Associate Professors (including Research, Teaching, and WOT faculty). Full Professors are no longer eligible to submit new proposals.
- Co-Is (formerly Co-PIs) are considered equal in status to the PI and must have a measurable role in the project. Including more than one Co-I requires justification.
- We now ask for a Lay Summary – rather than an abstract – on the proposal cover page.
- Zoom office hours to support applicant teams will be available from 1 to 2 pm on September 10, September 17, and September 24.
Contact the RRF administrative staff with questions about the program: Peter Wilsnack, 206-685-9316.
The purpose of this Notice is to highlight interest in addressing the role of violence in health outcomes and integrating violence-related screening and interventions into health care settings. This Notice is to encourage intervention research focused on addressing exposure to violence – including but not limited to child maltreatment, intimate partner violence/teen dating violence, elder mistreatment, peer violence/bullying, and community violence – to improve individual-level health processes and outcomes. Read more here.
Discover Global Society (Springer Nature) is currently welcoming submissions of original research to the “The Permutations of “Caring”: On the Individual, Family, and Societies” Collection, Guest Edited by Prof. JosAnn Cutajar (University of Malta, Malta).
Discover Global Society was launched by Springer Nature in 2023 and indexed in SCOPUS (CiteScore 0.4 [2024]). Discover Global Society is a fully open-access journal, which means that its contents are freely available and can be used by a world audience.
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To submit your manuscript for consideration at Discover Global Society as part of this Collection, please follow the steps detailed on this page. When submitting your manuscript via this portal, on the ‘Details’ page, please select the “The Permutations of “Caring”: On the Individual, Family, and Societies” Collection from the drop-down list. Authors should also express their interest in the Collection in the cover letter.
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CSDE Trainee Zoe H. Pleasure (Health Services) and CSDE External Affiliate Laura Lindberg (Rutgers) have been awarded research funding from the Society of Family Planning to study contraception misinformation. Pleasure and Lindberg will explore how contraceptive misinformation affects contraceptive health outcomes for gender-diverse young people in the U.S. through a nationally representative survey and qualitative interviews. This project builds on a seed grant funded through CSDE. Pleasure also received funding for a second project, with co-PI Asha Hassan (Minnesota), which will involve conducting qualitative interviews with individuals with chronic conditions to provide insight into how they interact with and navigate the complex information ecosystems related to contraception and chronic illness. To read more about Pleasure and Lindberg’s research grant, click here. To read more about Pleasure and Hassan’s research grant, click here.
CSDE External Affiliate Joshua Tom (Seattle Pacific) and co-authors recently published an article titled, “Religion and Racial Bias in Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models” in Socius. Tom and co-authors examine if LLMs hold implicit assumptions with regard to religious identities by prompting LLMs to generate religious sermons, specifying different combinations of race and religious tradition of the clergyperson. Evangelical Protestant pastors had easier to read AI–generated sermons, whereas Jewish rabbis and Muslim imams had more difficult to read synthetic texts. To read more, click here.
CSDE Affiliate Karin Martin (Public Policy) and co-authors recently shared an opinion piece in The Imprint on the incarceration of youth, which overwhelming evidence shows does not work and disproportionately affects communities of color. Drawing on their article published in the American Journal of Public Health, Martin and co-authors highlight the recent trend in closure of youth prisons and call on policymakers to redirect resources and attention to community-based alternatives. To read more, click here.
CSDE Research Scientist Matthew D. Dunbar, PhD, and co-authors recently published an article in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, titled “The companion dog as a translational model for Alzheimer’s disease: Development of a longitudinal research platform and post mortem protocols.” The authors describe the objectives, infrastructure, platform development, and protocol of the Brain Health Study (BHS). The BHS aims to establish the role of privately owned companion dogs as a translational model for Alzheimer’s Disease research.
Why dogs? Companion dogs share genetic diversity, environmental exposures, and cognitive traits with humans. Their condensed lifespans and human-like aging patterns make them an ideal model for understanding cognitive decline. The study’s research infrastructure is in place for longitudinal data collection, annual biospecimen collection and postmortem sample collection, with 500 dogs enrolled and 21 postmortem specimens already collected.
Dr. Dunbar, in his role as the Data Core Director for the Dog Aging Project, helped build the operational infrastructure for the BHS to support this diverse national cohort of companion dogs for an in-depth, longitudinal analysis of brain and cognitive health over their lifespan. A complex and well-maintained research platform was critical to facilitate enrollment, retention, ongoing participant surveys, and biobanking of biofluids and postmortem tissue. Dr. Dunbar has decades of experience designing primary data collection systems, managing field data campaigns, and he currently oversees CSDE’s own REDCap instance supporting population researchers.
To arrange a consultation appointment with Matt Dunbar or any of CSDE’s scientific support staff, please use the CSDE Science Core Consultation Request form.