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CSDE Seminar Series

Primary Research Area Panel

Panel: Demographic Methods for Estimating Mortality During Armed Conflict

Amy Hagopian, School of Public Health, UW

Abraham D. Flaxman, School of Public Health, UW

Patrick Heuveline, Department of Sociology, UCLA

Orsola Torrisi, Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi

Nathalie Williams (moderator), Department of Sociology and Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

Parrington Hall Room 360

To Join by Zoom: Register HERE

01/26/2024
12:30-1:30 PM PT

360 Parrington Hall

Co-Sponsor(s):

Population Health Initiative 

  • Amy Hagopian
    • Amy Hagopian, PhD, is professor Emeritus in public health at the University of Washington. She conducts academic work on how the maldistribution of power and wealth undermines health. She taught a class on war and health for 9 years at UW, along with Dr. Evan Kanter, and led a team to measure war-related morality in Iraq in 2011. She also taught a winter quarter class on homelessness, with an emphasis on causes and consequences of living unsheltered. She serves as a vice chair of the editorial board of the American Journal of Public Health and received the APHA’s Sidel-Levy award for Peace in 2018.
  • Abraham D. Flaxman
    • Abraham Flaxman, PhD, is Associate Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. He is currently leading the development of new methods for cost effective analysis with microsimulation and is engaged in methodological and operational research on verbal autopsy. Dr. Flaxman has previously designed software tools such as DisMod-MR that IHME uses to estimate the Global Burden of Disease, and the Bednet Stock-and-Flow-Model, which has produced estimates of insecticide-treated net coverage in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Patrick Heuveline
    • My research interests center on how childhood family structures affect child wellbeing and the transition to adulthood. My work to date has been divided between two main lines of research. The first one involves a set of comparative, secondary data analyses of youth wellbeing indicators across Western Nations. With several of my former U-Chicago graduate students, I have compared young adult morality rates, child poverty rates and educational outcomes across countries, and analyzed how these last two vary between children living in one- and those living in two-parent households. I have also studied how specific public policies may explain international differences in the relationship between living arrangements and childhood outcomes. Secondly, I have conducted research on families in Cambodia, and in particular, on the demographic and social consequences of the “Khmer-Rouge-Regime” (KRR) as the rulers of the Demographic Kampuchea (Cambodia, 1975-79) are generally referred to. On the demographic side, I have studied the impact of the regime on those who were adults under the KRR – the generation that suffered the highest mortality during the KRR but also contributed to the post-KRR baby boom. I then studied the psychological, social, and economic impact of the regime on the next generation, those who were children at the time and may have lost a parent, or both, during the KRR.
  • Orsola Torrisi
    • Orsola Torrisi is a social demographer and a Post-doctoral Associate at NYUAD Social Science Division. She holds a PhD in Demography from the London School of Economics. Orsola’s research focuses on the demography of crises and violence and is articulated around two core, complementary streams. One series of projects examines how exposure to armed violence interacts with processes of family formation, family relationships and how it influences sexual and reproductive health outcomes. Another line of research is dedicated to documenting the morality burden of armed conflict. In this sense, part of Orsola’s recent work has focused on the development of new data collection methods to measure adult and adolescent morality in settings where data is scarce, including in populations affect by disasters. With her research, Orsola aims to expand knowledge on how crises and uncertainty due to violence and disasters affect demographic processes and to advance demographic data collection efforts to ensure that good quality research can be conducted in unstable settings.