Come celebrate the start of the quarter with CSDE! Catch up with your colleagues, meet new affiliates, fellows, and trainees, and find out what is new at CSDE. Refreshments provided.
We’re meeting at the usual 12:30pm seminar time, but please note the special location for the Reception: Peterson Room Allen Library (4th Floor – Room 485)
The Center for Medicine, Health, and Society (MHS) at Vanderbilt University invites applications for a joint tenure-track Assistant Professor position with MHS and Public Policy, to begin fall semester 2018. We seek an interdisciplinary scholar who will have a tenure-track home in MHS and teaching duties in both MHS and Public Policy. Field of specialization is open, with preference for an interdisciplinary social scientist, theorist, or policy scholar whose work explores critical approaches to global health policies or institutions, global health inequities or disparities, global health politics and economies, or points of continuity between the so-called Global South and the US South. Regional specialty is open to scholars conducting research in any part of the world. Strong research skills and the ability to obtain external funding are highly desirable. The university is home to a strong network of global health researchers, and there are collaborative opportunities with multiple Arts and Science departments as well as in the School of Medicine.
Vanderbilt expects excellence in teaching and in research. PhD is required by August 16, 2018. To apply, please submit 1) a letter describing your research/teaching interests and professional experience; 2) curriculum vitae; 3) two samples of your scholarly writing; 4) available evidence of teaching effectiveness; and 5) three letters of reference. These materials should be addressed to Jonathan Metzl and Dominique Behague, Co-Chairs, Global Health Search Committee, and submitted via the Interfolio portal: http://apply.interfolio.com/44137
Applications will be reviewed starting October 1, 2017 and continue until the position is filled. Please contact Jonathan Metzl (jonathan.metzl@vanderbilt.edu) or Dominique Behague (dominique.behague@Vanderbilt.Edu) with any questions.
Welcome back to the academic year! Thanks to the good news about the renewal of CSDE’s research infrastructure grant from NICHD’s Population Dynamics Branch, CSDE starts the academic year with renewed energy and new plans. You can read about the award here. Notably, the strong support from the College of Arts & Sciences and from units across UW means that we can grow our support for UW’s community of population scientists. We’re looking forward to working with all of you over the next five years!
To celebrate, please join us on September 29 at 12:30 in the Peterson Room in Allen Library for a celebration of our grant renewal, graduate student successes, and your own achievements!
To meet the objectives of our renewed infrastructure grant, CSDE has recently undergone a reorganization. Instead of one Associate Director, we now have a Development Core Director, Professor Steve Goodreau (Anthropology) and a Science Core Director, Professor Kyle Crowder (Sociology). They join myself and Training Director, Associate Professor Emilio Zagheni (Sociology & eScience Institute).
Under Steve Goodreau’s direction, the Development Core includes the seminar series, an elaborated seed grant program, and specific activities within CSDE’s Primary Research Areas (PRAs). Chaired by Associate Professor Rachel Heath (Economics), CSDE’s weekly seminar series is on Fridays at 12:30pm. The new seed grant program will solicit proposals quarterly, as well as consider smaller requests on a rolling basis. Expect to hear more about this soon! The Development Core includes specific activities within each Primary Research Area (PRA). PRA Chairs are beginning to develop plans now, but they would love to hear your ideas. Heather Hill (Evans Public Policy & Governance) is chairing Well-being of Families and Households, Ann Bostrom (Evans Public Policy & Governance) is chairing Environments & Populations, Mark Ellis (Geography) is chairing Migrations & Settlements, David Grembowski is chairing Health of People & Populations, and I am serving as chair of Demographic Measurements & Methods in an interim capacity, while Adrian Raftery (Statistics & Sociology) is on leave.
Under Kyle Crowder’s direction, the Science Core identifies and implements ways for CSDE to fill research infrastructure needs at UW and, most importantly, tailor CSDE’s scientific research support to fit the needs of your research agenda. Dr. Matt Dunbar, CSDE’s Assistant Director and a Geographer, and Matt Weatherford, CSDE’s Computing Resources Director, help lead the Science Core’s activities. They are joined by Dr. Cori Mar, CSDE’s statistician, and Ellie Brindle, managing CSDE’s Biodemography Lab. The Science Core staff works closely with our Training Program to offer a regular workshop series for growing your population science tool kit. Students, staff and faculty are welcome to sign up for workshops. CSDE will soon search for a new research scientist to join the Science Core as an applied statistical demographer!
Under Emilio Zagheni’s direction, CSDE’s Training Program continues apace. The Certificate Program is managed by Dr. Aimee Dechter and is actively seeking new enrollees. Soon there will be a call for applications to our fellowship program for fellow appointments to begin 2018-19. Also on the agenda for this year will be an application to NICHD to renew our T32 Training Grant. Finally, a new development in the Training Program are ongoing, hands-on workshops for faculty and students. If you have one that you’d like to initiate, don’t hesitate to propose one. Currently, Emilio runs a monthly Computational Demography Workshop where students, staff and faculty share code, data, projects, and research challenges.
I direct CSDE’s Administrative Core, which includes support for grants, budgeting, hiring, events, travel, and communication. We can provide you with support on your grants from start-to-finish, budget projections and reconciliations, help with project management, meeting rooms and conference calling support, help in spreading the news about your research, and support with hiring appointments. We can also be the first place you turn to for who to talk with when trying to get your project off the ground or sustained. Thanks to the Evans School support for an RA, we have a fabulous information and communication specialist, Olivia Hill, who is pursuing an MPA at UW. Olivia is in 223 Raitt Hall, while the rest of the team (anchored by Thalia Freamon and Joanna Medina) are all in 206 Raitt Hall. Please stop by.
New academic years are also times of transitions. There have been several, but I will just mention one: over the summer, Professor Stewart Tolnay transitioned from a full-time faculty appointment to emeritus faculty. We will be celebrating Stew’s accomplishments on October 6 from 1-7:30pm, during a symposium (Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall) and reception (Hotel Deca) co-hosted with the Department of Sociology. Stew served as CSDE’s Associate Director from July 1, 2015 through June 30, 2017. But, over the years Stew supported at least four CSDE directors, in a large number of capacities. As you can see in my preceding description, Stew’s mighty contributions and service to CSDE have been replaced by two people, not one. That says it all. We’re looking forward to celebrating with him on October 6! Please rsvp to the event to: socws@uw.edu
Last but not least, over the last year, we’ve welcomed 11 new research affiliates to CSDE’s community of Population Scientists. Our new affiliates bring with them exciting research agendas; they include Ruanne Barnabas (Global Health), Elena Erosheva (Statistics), Dan Goldhaber (School of Social Work), Himanshu Grover (Urban Design & Planning), Carole Lee (Philosophy), Anita Rocha (School of Social Work), Noah Snyder-Mackler (Psycology), Janelle Taylor (Anthropology), Ott Toomet (Information School), and Claire Yang (Jackson School of International Studies). In addition, CSDE is happy to announce that Dr. David Swanson has joined as a regional affiliate. Dr. Swanson is an applied demographer, recently retired from UC Riverside. Dr. Swanson recently edited the volume, Frontiers of Applied Demography (Springer).
On behalf of all of us at CSDE, here’s to a productive year and we look forward to seeing you on September 29 to celebrate.
Affiliate Scott Allard, Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, was quoted in an Atlantic article about new Census data that indicate improvements in the nation’s poverty rate. According to Allard, who published the book Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty earlier this year, “it looks like the labor market growth is finally reaching down to some of our most vulnerable populations.” Allard is still concerned, however, that these economic improvements may detract attention from crucial policy issues relating to poverty. “We are seeing lots of positive developments, but that doesn’t mean we should be cutting our safety net,” he said. You can access the full article below.
In a recent article, affiliate Emily Williams–Associate Professor of Health Services–and colleagues examine smoking and alcohol use patterns among military members to determine whether experiences of sexual assault or harassment pose an increased risk for these behaviors. In the article, which was published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, the authors find that individuals have unique responses to experiences of sexual trauma in the military depending on their gender and history of smoking or alcohol use. While women in the study with previous unhealthy alcohol use who experienced sexual assault were almost twice as likely to relapse into these behaviors, men who were former smokers were six times as likely to resume smoking. The full article is available below.
Affiliates Jennifer Otten (lead author), Jake Vigdor, and Mark Long (along with UW colleagues James Buszkiewicz, Wesley Tang, Anju Aggarwal and Adam Drewnowski) recently published a paper titled “The Impact of a City-Level Minimum-Wage Policy on Supermarket Food Prices in Seattle-King County” in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Many states and localities throughout the U.S. have adopted higher minimum wages, and higher labor costs among low-wage food system workers could result in higher food prices. However, this study finds no evidence of change in supermarket food prices by market basket or increase in prices by food group in response to the implementation of Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance. This paper is part of a broader Minimum Wage Study at the University of Washington. The full paper is available below.
Affiliate Betty Bekemeier, Assistant Professor in Psychosocial & Community Health, recently co-authored an article that aims to assess the gap between spending on foundational public health services by local health jurisdictions (LHJs) and the costs for these jurisdictions to provide them. In the article, which was published in the August issue of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, Bekemeier and her co-authors find that spending by sampled LHJs is just 65% of what is needed to provide foundational public health services, though this difference in actual spending and costs varies by program. The authors subsequently conclude that spending by LHJs, which is likely affected by local conditions, falls significantly below the amount needed to provide overall foundational public health services. The full article is available below.
Visiting affiliate Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar has been invited to join the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture as a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow and Impact and Assessment Manager. Previously a Visiting Scholar at the Southeast Asia Center at the Jackson School of International Studies, she has most recently developed curriculum for the Seattle Community Colleges; taught sociology courses on race, immigration, inequality, and belonging at Seattle University and the University of Puget Sound; and published in scholarly journals including Sociological Perspectives, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and the Journal of Vietnam Studies. Nguyen-Akbar earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Australia and Public Policy and International Affairs Fellow at UC Berkeley. In Seattle, she has been a volunteer with the Rainier Valley Corps and the Vietnamese Friendship Association.
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Gerberding Hall 142
2:00 to 3:30 pm
The workshop will cover:
Please RSVP your plans to attend to: research@uw.edu
Presenters:
Caroline Harwood, PhD
Professor, Microbiology and Associate Vice Provost for Research
Kim Johnson-Bogart, PhD
Senior Director, Foundation Relations, Corporate and Foundation Relations
The primary territory in question comprises the major watersheds draining northward to the Arctic through the Hudson Bay and southward through the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. This large figure of land in North America, embodying the Nelson, Mississippi, and Great Lakes-St. Lawrence riversheds, is the site of important hydrologic activity that has profound impacts on the quality of continental fresh water and surrounding oceans. However, in contrast to urbanized coastal territories, the inner continental hydrographic area lacks equal attention as a space for water design. Yet there are acute opportunities for designers to propose territorial interventions, and localized interventions with territorial implications, that address unique human-hydrologic relationships in this fresh water space. Further, the fact that water is a complex territorial issue suggests that we expand our spatial and temporal understanding of water and think of it not as a natural system but as a constructed and living performance. To do this, we need new ways of describing, identifying, and representing the major manipulations and control of these territorial water systems, and of systems-based design approaches to address both the unique and the shared issues throughout this territory. Design-thinking methods and processes that open up and invent new approaches to these issues are urgently needed.
This symposium is relevant to designers and design-collaborative scholars and practitioners from a wide array of disciplines including: landscape architecture, architecture, urban design and planning, environmental design, geography, landscape ecology, river hydrology, urban hydrology, infrastructure and environmental engineering, environmental law and water policy, soils and geological science, forestry, agricultural science, mining and resources management, environmental economics, cultural history, and social and environmental justice. We are interested in a range of projects that bridge disciplinary and jurisdictional boundaries, wherein the issues and actions are consequential at a territorial water scale, and that need a diverse body of knowledge and methods to address them.
Keynote speakers and panel moderators will be announced during Fall 2017.
| Call for Abstracts opens: | September 20, 2017 |
| Abstracts due: | January 15, 2018 |
| Notification of acceptance: | April 1, 2018 |
| Registration opens: | TBD |
| Early bird registration deadline: | July 15, 2018 |
| Regular registration deadline: | August 31, 2018 |
| Conference: | September 14 & 15, 2018 |