Congratulations to all our poster presenters for their very good work! Extra kudos to CSDE Trainee and T32 Fellow David Coomes (Epidemiology) for winning the best poster award during CSDE’s Winter 2025 Lightning Talks & Poster Session. David’s presentation, titled “The Role of Migration in the Rural-Mortality Penalty” concluded that rurality and out-migration are both associated with increased mortality at the county-level. The association is strongest among small urban counties (population 2,500 – 20,000).

Many thanks to our other speakers, Elizabeth Nova (Sociology),“Needs Assessment of People Living in Vehicles in King County, WA”; Aryaa Rajouria (Sociology),”Migrating Narratives: A Text Analysis of Global News Coverage”; and Aidan Andronicos (Sociology), “Cancer Death Disparities and Uranium Mine Waste on Indian Reservations”. Thank you to our CSDE Program Coordinator Maddie Farris, CSDE Training Director Jessica Godwin, CSDE Certificate Program Advisor, Jill Fulmore and our student coordinator Desiree Salais for another great CSDE Lightning Talks & Poster Session. Finally, we want to thank everyone who attended and, especially, our wonderful CSDE Faculty Affiliates Panel of poster judges: Kyle Crowder, Audrey Dorelien, Pat Louie, Drew Messamore and Peter Catron.

The ownership and staffing of skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) have been closely watched by regulators in recent years. In a recent article published in Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, CSDE Affiliates Rachel Prusynski and Tracy Mroz (Department of Rehabilitation Medicine) along with several colleagues examine whether changes in SNF ownership were linked to shifts in staffing levels for nurses, non-nurses, administrators, and contract workers. The findings indicate that SNF ownership changes were associated with declines in overall patient care staffing, driven by nurse staffing declines. Read more here.

Scholars and policymakers disagree about the causes of the dramatic racial inequalities in child welfare system outcomes such as child protection (CPS) investigations and child maltreatment. In a recent essay in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, CSDE External Affiliate Frank Edwards (Rutgers University) attempts to bridge the divide and argues that researchers and practitioners should emphasize analytical approaches that recognize the complex impacts of structural racism. Read the essay here.

The minimum quality standards (MQSs) for milk adopted by most major American cities around the turn of the 20th century present a valuable case study in public health history. In a recent article, CSDE External Affiliate D. Mark Anderson (Montana State University) and colleagues present the results of a study that estimates the effect of milk inspectors, who were tasked with enforcing MQSs, on deaths due to diarrhea and typhoid. Read the full study here.

We are looking for a full-time Administrator to support our population science research infrastructure center funded by the NICHD.

With the Director, the Administrator is a primary point person for the development, coordination and implementation of center-wide efforts (including infrastructure and training grants, as well as reporting for internal and external purposes). The Administrator is the chief financial officer and business manager responsible for financial planning, management and overseeing daily center operations, acting independently and responsibly, given general direction from the Director and within the University’s policies and procedures. These responsibilities include departmental administration, business planning, financial management, personnel, research project support and other functions as necessary. Learn more and apply here.

The National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program has expanded its data available for research to now include information from more than 633,000 participants – a 50% increase from the previous release. These updates enhance the program’s vast and comprehensive dataset, one of the largest globally, to accelerate discoveries that will help tackle complex health challenges.

The research community is facing a period of rapid change and uncertainty in the federal funding landscape. The university is closely monitoring changes and their potential impacts to the UW research enterprise. Information on the Office of Research’s Guidance on Federal Administration Research Policy page is updated frequently. If you are a researcher and interested in receiving updates, please subscribe to PI Federal communications (you’ll need UWNETID). The Provost’s office is also maintaining a site for all Federal Policy Updates.

CSDE is a member of the Association of Population Centers, and through them can offer you or your colleagues the opportunity to have new or forthcoming research that you want to share with policymakers, journalists, educators, or other non-academic audiences. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB), in collaboration with APC, is working to improve the dissemination of population and reproductive health findings. If you have peer-reviewed research on population dynamics, population health, or reproductive health that you would like to share with a broader audience in an easily digestible format, APC and PRB may be able to help.  To learn how, visit their website and take a look at recent research policy briefs.

CSDE is a member of the Association of Population Centers and through them can offer you and your colleagues access to their preprint publishing platform. Research Scientists, Postdoctoral affiliates and faculty are invited to submit to the APCA Working Paper Series which gathers and disseminates original population science research papers. These working papers are authored or coauthored by scholars who are faculty or postdoctoral affiliates of the Association of Population Centers (APC) population centers.

We are excited to announce that Future of Families and Child Well-being Study (FFCWS) data are now available at the NWFSRDC. FFCWS is the longest-running and only contemporary U.S. birth cohort study of young adults based on a national sample. FFCWS follows children from birth through young adulthood, enabling researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to understand the impacts of family structure, education, employment, income, health, housing, and resource sharing on human development.

The challenges of data access during federal administrative transitions can happen every four years. What follows are some resources that might be useful. We will continue to update this blog post with new information. If you have any links that could be helpful, please send csde@uw.edu your updated and helpful information. We know that what follows may not provide you with the exact data you need, so let us know what you need and what’s missing and we can try to find where it is located.

Over the course of the twentieth century, fertility intentions, desires, preferences, and attitudes (fertility “goals”) became key constructs for demographic research on fertility. The increasing focus in the past two decades on reproductive autonomy and reproductive justice highlights women’s (and occasionally men’s) own desires and preferences as the foundational concern for policy and programmatic activity. An upcoming webinar sponsored by the Ohio Population Consortium seek to explore the ways fertility goals have been defined and measured.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment program has a call for Letters of Inquiry related to Interdisciplinary Social Science Research on Energy System Interactions in the United States. This call seeks research projects led by early- and mid-career scholars that analyze the systemic interactions and connections associated with the transition to a low-carbon economy in the United States. The call encourages the submission of research project ideas that examine the links and implications between different components of the energy system and how they relate to other aspects of the economy.

The Human Mortality Database Project team invites contributions to the 7 th HMD Symposium. This year, the Symposium will be dedicated to investigating the main drivers and obstacles to longevity progress in the pre- and post-COVID eras. Contributions from demographers, epidemiologists, public health experts and researchers from related fields conducting analyses based on the cause-of-death series newly integrated into the Human Mortality Database (HMD) are particularly encouraged. The Symposium seeks to address major topics and challenges of substantive research as well as methodological and data issues.

The Association for Economic Research of Indigenous Peoples (AERIP), the American Society of Hispanic Economists (ASHE), and the National Economic Association (NEA) invite paper submissions for the 9th annual Freedom and Justice summer conference July 31-August 2, 2025 in Puerto Rico. The Freedom and Justice Conference is an interdisciplinary social justice conference that attracts a small group of scholars dedicated to discussing pressing economic problems and their solutions for communities of color. They are especially interested in paper submissions that address the following topics, including those that have an intersectional analysis (examples below):

• • Cooperative Economics
  • Health disparities
  • Racial wealth inequality
  • Social movements for economic justice, independence, and equal rights

On April 1st, the UW School of Public Health will host a talk from Dr. Claudia Gross Shader entitled "Addressing Places in Seattle Where Overdoses and Crime are Concentrated: An Evidence-Based Approach."

Dr. Gross Shader is the Research and Evaluation Director for the City of Seattle’s Office of the City Auditor. In her role, Dr. Gross Shader authors reports for City leaders regarding public safety, unsheltered homelessness, and substance use disorder, manages City Council-funded projects with university research partners to conduct rigorous evaluations of City ordinances and programs, and serves as the City’s research liaison on federally-funded public safety evaluations. Dr. Gross Shader has worked for the City of Seattle since 1993 and has been with the Office of City Auditor since 2002. She has a Master’s degree in Public Administration and a Ph.D. in Criminology.

(read more)

The UW Population Health Initiative (PHI) has released their call for Tier 3 grant applications. The purpose of this tier of grant is to support faculty and PI-eligible staff to create follow-on opportunities for impactful projects that have developed preliminary data or realized proof-of-concept, and are seeking to scale their efforts and/or expand the scope of their work. The Initiative is seeking applications from interdisciplinary project teams with awards of up to $150,000 per project – or $200,000 per project for teams proposing meaningful partnerships with community-based organizations.

There has been a broad array of research efforts to measure the amount of usage of digital technology (e.g. total screen time) and the observed effects and impact on health. Despite these efforts, the full implications – both positive and negative – on human physiology, psychology, behaviour, well-being and mental health remain unclear.  To address this gap, the Huo Family Foundation invites applications for special projects on "The Effects of the Usage of Digital Technology on Brain Development, Social Behaviours and Mental Health in Children and Young People."

The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) and Arnold Ventures recently announced a collaborative call for causal research on the criminal justice system. Criminal justice policies and practices include the work of the police, courts, jails, prisons, probation and parole, and immigration detention. Proposals must include causal research designs that can reliably isolate the treatment effects of a policy, practice, or intervention such as difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, and randomized controlled trials.

The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), in collaboration with other NIH institutes, centers, and offices, is seeking applications to support the development of short courses focused on cutting-edge methodologies and analytics in behavioral and social sciences research (BSSR).

This request for applications aims to enhance education and training in innovative data collection and analysis techniques, big data applications, and underutilized research designs that are essential for advancing BSSR but are not widely available through existing programs.

This is a postdoctoral fellowship program for grants of up to $250,000 USD to support early career researchers in the social sciences and humanities (with particular emphasis on philosophy, sociology of science, and metascience) who are interested in building a career in understanding the implications of AI for the science and research ecosystem. Grants of up to $250,000 (USD) over up to two years will be awarded to social sciences and humanities postdoctoral researchers who study the implications of AI for Science. Learn more here.

The application for the 2025-26 Gatzert Child Welfare Fellowship for Dissertation Writing is now open in MyGrad and is due on April 15, 2025 at 12 PM (noon) PST.

This fellowship is for the final stages of writing a Ph.D. dissertation that contributes to the lives of children with disabilities. The program funds one quarter of UW state tuition and fees, GAIP insurance, and a stipend at the Predoctoral TA II rate.

This five-day workshop from June 16-20 in Ann Arbor, MI will orient participants to the content and structure of the core PSID interview, its special topics modules, and its supplemental studies, including the Child Development Supplement (CDS), the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS), and the 2013 Rosters and Transfers Module. In addition we will discuss topics including the genomics data collected from children and adults as well as new data files which explain family relationships and demographic characteristics over time.

Submissions are now open for research to be featured at the 2025 APPAM Fall Research Conference. This year’s conference theme is “Forging Collaborations for Transformative and Resilient Policy Solutions.” Submissions are being solicited from the following policy areas (sample included below):

• Education
• Employment and Training Programs
• Health Policy
• Innovations in Science and Technology
• Poverty and Income Policy
• Social Equity and Race

The William T. Grant Scholars Program supports career development for promising early-career researchers. The program funds five-year research and mentoring plans that significantly expand researchers’ expertise in new disciplines, methods, and content areas.

Applicants should have a track record of conducting high-quality research and an interest in pursuing a significant shift in their trajectories as researchers. We recognize that early-career researchers are rarely given incentives or support to take measured risks in their work, so this award includes a mentoring component, as well as a supportive academic community.

The Health and Medical Care Archive, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is sponsoring a workshop during the annual ICPSR Summer Program in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Be sure to apply for this workshop in advance––enrollment is capped at 25 participants. Apply by 5/26/25.

CSDE collaborates with the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in a doctoral training program called the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS). This program is based in Rostock, Germany, but includes 12 doctoral programs in the U.S. and Europe. CSDE has one IMPRS-PHDS fellowship application slot available to current CSDE Trainees. The fellowship funding will support a one quarter research stay at the MPIDR any time between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026.

We invite early career faculty affiliates to join our new mailing list, csde_earlycareer. Among other things, this is the way to find out info about our quarterly Early Career Affiliate happy hours, and you won’t want to miss those! These will be a great way to meet up with other junior scholars in a fun and casual atmosphere over snacks and drinks. Who counts as early career, you ask? Typically we mean folks who are pre-promotion (i.e. assistant professor or equivalent), but we're not strict! Join the list here (Please note - this is for faculty only - we are strict about that. Sorry, all others!)

Check this space for new activities and events leading up to PAA 2025. We will update it regularly as the conference approaches:

Join the Network on Education, Biosocial Pathways, and Dementia across Diverse Populations (EdDem) at PAA 2025 for coffee, breakfast, and casual networking! We will meet at A Baked Joint (420 K St NW, Washington, DC 20001) on Friday, April 11th from 8:30 – 10:30am. We hope to see you there!