Five years after the murder of George Floyd, CSDE Affiliate Alexes Harris (Sociology) was featured on a KING 5 roundtable about the state of the Black Lives Matter movement and the push for racial equity. Despite public skepticism about policy changes since 2020, Dr. Harris described some meaningful changes that have occurred. “Our ancestors have gone through much worse than this moment, and we stand on their shoulders,” Harris said during the roundtable. “Struggle has made this country better … it gives me optimism for the future.” Watch the full roundtable conversation here.

CSDE Affiliate and eScience Institute Senior Data Science Fellow Tyler McCormick (Sociology) will give a CSSS seminar titled “Robustly Estimating Heterogeneity in Factorial Data Using Rashomon Partitions” on Wednesday, June 4th at 12:30 p.m. in Savery 409. Learn more and register here.

Recent studies have shown that large language models such as GPT-4 outperform humans in some aspects of writing. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to discern between human and AI-generated writing. In a recent article published in The Conversation, CSDE Affiliate Jevin West (Information School) and co-authors explore the implications of this development based on their recently published research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In their analysis, the authors highlight the importance of raising awareness of these changes and developing a deeper understanding of AI’s anthropomorphic qualities. Read the article here.

The 14^th annual workshop on Research Design for Causal Inference will be held at Northwestern Law School in Chicago, IL from July 28th to August 6th, 2025. In person-registration is limited to 125 participants for each workshop, and there will also be a Zoom option. Learn more and register here.

Applications for the 19th Annual 2025 Graduate Climate Conference (GCC) hosted by MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on November 7-9, 2025, at Woods Hole, MA are now open! The deadline to apply is June 8th, 2025.

The GCC is a student-led, interdisciplinary conference (co-hosted by UW and MIT) that offers graduate students a unique opportunity to share their climate-focused research and connect with peers from a wide range of disciplines. Conference attendance is fully funded, with additional limited support available to help cover travel expenses. Apply here.

The GCC is an annual interdisciplinary climate conference run by graduate students, for graduate students featuring panel discussions, presentations, workshops, social events, and more. More information about the organizers, conference history and logistics can be found on the GCC website.

GCC highlights climate research from a variety of disciplines within the physical, natural, and social sciences and humanities. The organizers strive to feature a diverse representation of students and research topics to create a broader, more inclusive community for emerging leaders in climate-related fields. We encourage students from all backgrounds and stages of their graduate careers to apply. 

The deadline for abstract submission is June 8th. The application link is attached above, and can be found on the website as well. There is no fee to register or apply. Acceptances will be emailed in July. Limited funding to cover any costs incurred by attending the conference will be awarded on an as-needed basis to as many participants as possible.

For conference updates, please check the GCC website or follow us on social media.

Please contact the Organizing Committee with any additional questions at gradclimateconference@gmail.com

In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, the Spencer Foundation, The Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have developed a rapid response bridge grant opportunity for impacted scholars. This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF. While it is impossible for private philanthropy to close the gap left by federal funders, we can provide modest grants to mitigate some of the impact on scholars, projects, and project teams.

To be eligible for these grants, scholars must: (1) be working on research on STEM and education (including AI and CS, graduate education and MSIs, and scholarship that aims to reduce inequality), and (2) have had a recently terminated or cancelled grant from NSF. These $25,000 grants are for activities to address immediate needs following grant cancellations, including completing a wave of data collection, analyzing already collected data or writing, thoughtful project closure with community partners, or preparing grant proposals to continue the research. Learn more here.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) recently published findings from the 2024 Unsheltered Point-in-Time (PIT) Count. This count, which is used to allocate federal funds to support regional efforts to end homelessness, was widely understood to be an undercount in recent years. CSDE Affiliate Zack Almquist and CSDE Trainee Ihsan Kahveci (Sociology) have been collaborating with CSDE Research Scientist June Yang and KCRHA to improve the precision of PIT counts in the last several years, and they shared their work alongside KCRHA at CSDE recent 75th anniversary celebration. Almquist and Kahveci’s helped write the recent report on the 2024 effort. Read a summary of the findings here and the full published report here.

We are looking forward to hosting Holly Hummer from The University of British Columbia on Friday, May 30th in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative.

When: 05/30/2025, 12:30-1:30 PM PT

Where: Parrington Hall Room 360

To Join By Zoom: Register HERE

In our era of low fertility rates, much research has examined the role of macro-level context in enabling or constraining individuals’ reproductive and parenthood decisions. Yet, we know less about the role of context in shaping what it means to remain childless—a historically stigmatized status—today. This presentation draws on in-depth interviews with 157 non-mothers in the U.S. and Japan to examine if and how individuals without children experience and evaluate childlessness differently by country. When analyzed in comparative perspective, women in Japan were more likely to frame childlessness as increasingly normalized and justifiable via entrenched gender inequalities whereas women in the U.S. were more likely to emphasize the socially isolating and publicly contested nature of childlessness, often drawing on moral logics to then justify their non-motherhood. To contextualize these narrative divergences, I offer two mechanisms that emerged as relevant in women’s interviews: the perceived (in)flexibility of becoming and being a “good” mother and national demographic conditions. Overall, findings illustrate how macro-level structural and cultural factors complicate the status of not having children, leading to diverse social experiences and sense-making strategies.