The Belmont Forum, START, Future Earth, and regional partners seek applications to participate in a skill-building opportunity on conducting transdisciplinary (TD) research. The workshops will focus on advancing principles of co-design and co-production in the natural, social, and engineering sciences that address complex sustainability challenges associated with the Belmont Challenge (https://www.belmontforum.org/). These workshops seek to advance skill development in TD research, as well as increasing aptitude for developing proposals with strong TD elements, which is a cornerstone of all the Belmont Forum’s multi-year Collaborative Research Action (CRA), including the recently launched call on urbanization and the food-energy-water nexus (http://www.sugi-nexus.org/). Learning activities within each workshop will be organized around a regionally relevant case study on the food-energy-water nexus.

The workshops will be three-day events with approximately 30 participants per workshop. We welcome applicants from researcher, policy, private sector, and practitioner communities. The participants will be apportioned as approximately 2/3 from the research community and 1/3 from practitioner, private sector, and policy communities.

WORKSHOP LOCATIONS

• Tempe, Arizona
  • Dates: February 22-24, 2017
  • Theme: Extreme heat and its impact on the Food-Energy-Water nexus
  • Venue: Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University
  • Partners: NSF, START, Belmont Forum, Future Earth, Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, and Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC)
• Boulder, Colorado
  • Dates: March 1-3, 2017
  • Theme: Food-Energy-Water on the South Platte River
  • Venue: University of Colorado
  • Partners: NSF, START, Future Earth, Belmont Forum, and Sustainability Innovation Lab at Colorado at the University of Colorado
• Baltimore, Maryland
  • Dates: Late Spring 2017 (A separate call will be released for this workshop)
  • Theme: TBA
  • Venue: TBA
  • Partners: NSF, START, Belmont Forum, Future Earth, and others

ELIGIBILITY

• Applicants must be based in the U.S.

TO APPLY

Applications must be submitted by January 18, 2017 to Sarah Schweizer. The application requires the following components:

• A Statement of Interest describing:
  • Relevant background knowledge and experience that the applicant can share with other participants
  • The anticipated impact of participation on the institution where you work
  • How the workshop will advance your own ability to conduct TD research or to engage with a TD process design
  • If a co-collaborator/partner you work with is also applying
  • Any unique ideas, skills, and/or foreseeable opportunities for advancing follow-on activities subsequent to workshop participation, including the identification of potential partner organizations
  • How the workshop will improve your potential proposal submission for the Belmont Collaborative Research Action on food-energy-water nexus-in-urban (http://www.sugi-nexus.org/)
• Curriculum vitae or resume
• Supporting letter from applicant’s home institution
• Specify which workshop location you would like to attend

Travel support is available for those individuals selected to participate and will include round-trip economy class airfare, accommodations, and modest daily subsistence while at the workshop.

The Project on Borders and Boundaries in World Politics has two openings for post-doctoral research fellows for one year, renewable, full-time appointments. Fellows will split their time between their own research and work with a team led by Professor Beth Simmons, Andrea Mitchell University Professor in Law, Political Science, and Business Ethics. The Project is concerned with boundaries between organized human communities, broadly understood. International borders, border regions and border crossings have multiple significance as designations of state authority, security buffers, expressions of social meaning and opportunities for economic integration. Border regions and activities speak to national and local encounters with neighbors and the rest of the world. This project is concerned with how humans demarcate the space between “us” and “them.” It contextualizes border architecture, infrastructure and institutions as expressions of various social, political and economic anxieties associated with globalization. This research team will concern itself with a broad range of questions relating to “bordering” in world politics. Applicants with an interest in territorial politics; migration and movement across borders; development in and across border regions; border crossing regimes, architectures and institutions; transnational migration; transnational crime, human trafficking and law enforcement across borders; and related issues are welcome to apply. Skills in empirical spatial analysis, GIS technologies, mapping technologies, experimental analyses, computerized textual and imaging analyses, and similar technologies are highly desirable, as are computer programming skills and experience using large computer databases and statistical software.

There are no mandatory reaching responsibilities. Postdoctoral fellows will be expected to give a presentation during the academic year in the Perry World House Seminar Series, engage with Perry World House’s Undergraduate Student Fellows, and attend regularly scheduled seminars. Perry World House will also introduce each postdoctoral fellow to related faculty and leaders of centers and institutes at the University of Pennsylvania.

Postdocs will be housed with the Global Innovation Program, which is the research arm of Perry World House, the University of Pennsylvania’s new university-wide hub for global engagement and interdisciplinary international research. Perry World House aspires to bring the University of Pennsylvania’s intellectual resources to bear on the urgent global challenges of the 21st century.

A critical question in the development of mobile health interventions is, when and in which contexts, is it most useful to push intervention content to the user. This question concerns time-varying dynamic moderation by the context on the effectiveness of in-the-moment interventions on user behavior. In this talk we discuss the micro-randomized trial design and associated data analyses for use in assessing moderation. We illustrate this approach with data from a micro-randomized mobile health trial.

Susan A. Murphy is the H.E. Robbins Distinguished University Professor of Statistics & Professor of Psychiatry and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. Her research focuses on improving sequential, individualized, decision making in health, in particular on clinical trial design and data analysis to inform the development of mobile health interventions. She participates in a variety of mobile health collaborations including the “Mobile Sensor Data to Knowledge,” https://md2k.org/, Center for Complex Data to Knowledge in Drug Abuse and HIV Behavioral Science, https://methodology.psu.edu/node/657, and multiple R01’s involving the development of just-in-time adaptive interventions in mobile health. Susan is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Fellow of the College on Problems in Drug Dependence, a former editor of the Annals of Statistics, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Medicine and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

The deadline to submit papers for the 2017 ASA Meetings is January 11th. The link to the ASA conference and submission system can be found below.

Additionally, the ASA International Migration Section sessions will take place on Saturday, August 12th. The sessions have been organized by Chair-Elect, David Fitzgerald. The session topics, as well as other information about the event, can be found at https://asamigrationsection.wordpress.com/2017-im-sessions-in-montreal/.

Email submissions to asa.int.mig@gmail.com.

Microsoft is offering a free, hands-on, cloud computing training course in partnership with the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. Whether it’s big data, big compute (HPC), machine learning with GPUs, or analyzing data streaming from devices for an IoT project, you can see how easy it is using Microsoft Azure to help you streamline and accelerate your data-driven science.

This course is for Faculty, researchers, and students using any language, framework, or platform. This includes Linux, Python, R, MATLAB, Java, Hadoop, STORM, SPARK, and Microsoft technologies such as C#, F#, Microsoft .NET, Microsoft Azure SQL Database, and various Microsoft Azure services.

Title:  Population Change, Economic Transformations, Environment and Rural Community Well Being
Conveners: Neil Argent, University of new England, Australia; David L. Brown, Cornell University, USA; Dudley Poston, Texas A&M University, USA.
Objectives: To examine the interrelationships between population change and local community well- being. A second objective is to examine the relationships between population change and changes in the natural environment.
Topic of the WG: This working group will examine the determinants and consequences of rural population change. The main focus will be on how changes in population size, structure, socio-demographic composition, and spatial distribution affect and are affected by community well-being as indicated by such factors as inequality, poverty, un- and underemployment, economic restructuring, etc. We also encourage scholars to submit papers focusing on population-environment interrelationships (by which we include changes in resource-based industries such as mining as well as climate change.  Since we are interested in examining the interrelationships between population change and community, we propose to examine how community well-being and environmental change affects population dynamics, and vice versa. We are hoping that scholars from a wide range of nations will participate so that we can examine how population-society relationships might be affected by the nations in which they occur.
Format: The format will be standard paper sessions with discussants. Papers will have to be submitted at least two weeks prior to the conference so that the discussant has ample time to prepare helpful remarks. We may also organize a panel discussion of the impacts of population change, environmental change and rural society and economy.