The CDC is accepting applications for a GS-13 epidemiologist in the Behavioral and Clinical Surveillance Branch in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. This position will close on December 5, 2017.
The overarching mission of the Behavioral and Clinical Surveillance Branch is to guide HIV prevention and care by identifying, monitoring, and reporting the drivers of the HIV epidemic. This position has two vacancies that will be situated in the Behavioral Surveillance Team and will support the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance (NHBS) system and other team projects. NHBS is CDC’s comprehensive system for conducting bio-behavioral surveillance among persons at highest risk for HIV infection in the United States. NHBS is implemented in metropolitan statistical areas with the highest disease burden. NHBS survey and testing activities are conducted in rotating annual cycles of surveillance among men who have sex with men, persons who inject drugs and heterosexuals at increased risk for HIV infection.
Desired qualifications include experience designing, overseeing, implementing, and conducting major scientific surveys/surveillance for HIV/AIDS or other infectious diseases and providing technical advice and assistance to national, state and local health agencies and other organizations. In addition to technical expertise, the position requires excellent oral and written communication skills, strong interpersonal skills, and preference for working in a team environment.
For a Poetics of Subaltern Life-Worlds: New Research, New Imaginaries of Informal Economies in Contemporary India
December 1-2, 2017
More than ninety percent of India’s workforce finds uncertain livelihoods through informal work: agricultural labor, construction, street vending, transportation, waste picking, sex work, and domestic labor, to name but a few. While the employment challenge—10 million jobs a year—that confronts countries like India is humbling, the existing scholarship in fields like labor studies, urban geography, rural sociology, and feminist studies has been resolutely economistic. With few exceptions, it has had little to say about the experiences, life-making activities (poïesis), and desires of the men and women, many from historically subordinated caste groups, who toil in India’s cities even as they remain enmeshed with ongoing lives in their villages.
This workshop brings together researchers in the US and India who are breaking new ground in how to think about the contours of informal economies in India and beyond. We call for a radically new intellectual approach to the life-worlds of denizens of informal economies: specifically, a humanistic approach that does not take for granted commonly employed dualisms such as formal and informal, urban and rural, and production and reproduction.
1. Interiority of selfhood
2. Habitations of time and space
3. Entanglements of production and reproduction
4. Mutual imprint of the country and the city
The workshop includes comparative analyses of informality in the US, South Korea, and China. It concludes with a session on public scholarship and technologies of communication to communicate our research to concerned communities effectively. We plan to publish public-minded online essays after the workshop.
Schedule, speaker bios, and more information at the link below.
Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry are sibling non-profit volunteer organizations whose members teach researchers how to use computing tools and tools for management, analysis and visualization of data.
On January 8th-11th we will hold four half-day (9 AM – noon each day) Software and Data Carpentry workshops at the eScience Data Science Studio. The Software Carpentry workshop is focused on software tools to make researchers more effective, allowing them to automate research tasks, automatically track their research over time, and use programming in Python to accelerate their research, and make it more reproducible. The Data Carpentry workshop focuses on programming in R, on data processing, as well as data visualization and data management.
These are two parallel tracks, and participants can only participate in one or the other.
For details, and to register for one of the upcoming workshops, please refer to the following web-page: https://uwescience.github.io/2018-01-08-uw/
Please email Ariel Rokem (arokem@uw.edu) with any questions about the workshop.
The National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCR) LIVES – Overcoming Vulnerability: life course perspectives – and the Bremen International Graduate School in Social Sciences (BIGSSS) are pleased to announce the opportunity for Ph.D. students and young researchers to participate in the LIVES Winter School on Life Course. The course will take place in Bremen from 12 to 18 March 2018.
The LIVES Course Winter School is a one-week intensive program on life course research. Two interdisciplinary workshops (drawing from sociology, social psychology, life-span psychology, social demography, social policy) will take place in small groups of 6 to 8 students. Three to four experts will lead each two different research workshops, with the aim of preparing collaborative articles through a process of learning by doing. The 2018 workshops are:
- Social networks, social participation and life transitions: a life course perspective with Eric Widmer (Geneva University), Karin Wall (University of Lisbon), Rita Gouveia (University of Lisbon) and Marie Baeriswyl (Geneva University)
- How do values and political orientations develop across the life-span? with Klaus Boehnke (Jacobs University), Regina Arant (Jacobs University), Maria Pavlova (University of Vechta) and Clemens Lechner (GESIS, Mannheim)
Application deadline: December 29, 2017
Affiliate Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, Associate Professor of Epidemiology, co-authored a recent Crosscut article that addresses planning for gun violence in light of recent shootings across the nation. Within the past two months alone, there have been shootings in Las Vegas, San Antonio, and now Red Bluff, California. According to the authors, “We have become so inured to gun violence that we plan around it instead of planning to stop it.” One such effort to plan around gun violence is Stop the Bleed, a national campaign aimed at providing education and equipment that will enable individuals to stop fatal bleeding. The authors underscore the importance of the initiative’s efforts to empower individuals to take potentially life-saving action in the event of gun violence. “This is not a call to live in fear, but a call to live with awareness,” they said. “We are not helpless in the face of gun violence, and bleeding control is a step to reducing its harm.” The full article is available below.
In her dissertation, Michelle O’Brien—a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and former CSDE Fellow and Trainee—aims to examine the long-term consequences of the Tajik Civil War on population change and migration. The Tajik civil war raged from 1992-1997, killing an estimated 60,000 and displacing a million residents to northern Tajikistan or Afghanistan. Most of the violence was concentrated in 1992 and 1993, but the experience of violence and uncertainty still emerges in discussions of daily life in Tajikistan today. To inform her research, O’Brien decided to spend the summer in Tajikistan in order to try to ‘get under the skin’ of the country. During her time there, she conducted interviews with key informants at non-government organizations that helped her understand the development strategies after the war, presented some of her preliminary quantitative findings to the United Nations Development Programme, traveled as much as she could, and made friends across the country. You can read more about O’Brien’s research and travels at the link below.
Within the past couple of decades, academia has experienced not only an increase in competition for a decreasing amount of funding, but also the aging of the research workforce. Furthermore, senior researchers are more likely to be awarded funding than are those in the beginnings, and perhaps even the middle, of their research careers. So while newer researchers may face difficulties in securing opportunities that will enable them to get their careers off the ground, relatively more experienced researchers may not be able to continue their career trajectory due to challenges in renewing or obtaining new grants. To combat these issues, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has created the “Next Generation Researchers Initiative,” which seeks to augment opportunities for early and mid-career researchers to secure funding. You can read more about the initiative and the issues driving it below.