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: May 30th, 2025 from 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.

(read more)

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.

The Association of Population Centers ARXIV (APCA) Working Paper Series regularly features original works in progress and pre-publication population science papers from faculty or postdoctoral affiliates of the Association of Population Centers (APC) member institutions. CSDE External Affiliate David Swanson (UC Riverside) recently had two co-authored studies featured in the APCA series. In a paper entitled “Population Aging in the Western Hemisphere," Swanson and co-author Richard Verdugo examine the future of population aging in the four regions of the Western Hemisphere. Another study, entitled “A New Approach For Developing Probabilistic Intervals Around Population Forecasts: A Subnational Example Using Washington State Counties,” with Jeff Tayman, proposes a method for producing measures of uncertainty that can be applied to existing subnational population forecasts while meeting several important criteria, including the concept of utility. Access the two pre-prints here and here.

UW recently announced the selection of five accomplished faculty members to represent the university in the 2025–2026 Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Academic Leadership Program (ALP). CSDE Affiliate Wendy Barrington and Director Sara Curran were both named as ALP Fellows. Their selection reflects the university’s deep commitment to academic excellence, faculty leadership development, and the collaborative promise of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Participation in the ALP will further position both leaders to advance institutional change and mentor future leaders. Read the full announcement here.

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.

Dewey Data is a research platform that provides access to third-party datasets across a variety of data categories including foot traffic, construction permits, healthcare, workforce, consumer behavior, and transportation.

University of Washington faculty, students, and researchers are eligible for access and must register an individual account. Follow this link to learn about how to register.

If you are a graduate student or post doc conducting environmental demography research, join the biweekly Population and Environment Working Group meeting organized by Sara Ronnkvist (sronnkvist@wisc.edu) and hosted by the University of Wisconsin. This informal working group meets every other Friday at 10 am CST (Madison, WI time) (8am PST). Please fill out this google form to join the listserv and be notified of future meetings.

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.

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.

The 14th 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.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released a request for rapid response grants focused on racial and indigenous health equity. Applicants whose health equity research projects* have lost federal funding are eligible to apply. Documentation demonstrating impact is required (e.g., a termination letter). The grants are available through the RWJF Evidence for Action (E4A) initiative. Learn more and apply here, or attend a weekly E4A office hour here.

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.

Information about the program, the faculty, and partner institutions can be found here.

Applications are due to CSDE by Friday, May 30. Apply here.

Join the Center for Aging, Climate, and Health (CACHE) for an upcoming Climate 101 webinar!

On June 5th, Dr. Christian Braneon of the City University of New York (CUNY) Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR) will cover climate variability, the components of climate risk, and insights on developing projections of future climate for interdisciplinary research. 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.

The journal Prevention Science is inviting letters of intent proposing manuscripts for potential publication in a forthcoming special issue, “Leveraging Partnerships with Governmental Agencies to Advance Prevention Science, Policy, and Practice.” This special issue will bring together original papers from scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the prevention science field to highlight exemplary partnership models between researchers and governmental agencies that have produced empirical research with impacts on prevention practice and policy decisions. Read the full call for proposals here.

The Center for Aging, Climate, and Health (CACHE) recently announced seed funding for projects integrating social and environmental data to examine the intersections of aging, climate, and health. CACHE anticipates making 2-3 awards of $20,000 and several smaller awards at $7,500. The deadline to apply is June 20, 2025. Learn more and apply here.

The Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center is now accepting applications for its 2026 Faculty Fellowship Program, which supports research related to climate adaptation in Northwest natural and cultural resource management as well as training in the principles and practices of co-producing decision-relevant science. This is a “last-mile” program that funds activities aimed at enhancing the usability of existing research for natural resource managers. 

The Kaiser Permanente Center for Gun Violence Research and Education is pursuing a world free of gun violence, where impacted communities drive the meaningful change needed for a healthy and safe society. Coordinated in collaboration with Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI), the Center endeavors to transform the gun violence research and education field.

The Center seeks to meet these needs by broadening the field of research to include more researchers and organizations that focus explicitly on healthcare approaches to addressing gun violence and work closely with communities affected by gun violence.

The Bradley Foundation is a private grantmaking foundation that honors the principles and example of its namesakes, Lynde and Harry Bradley, by pursuing a mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism. The foundation has a rolling proposal process around grants for its Constitutional Order and Informed Citizens initiatives. Projects should have budgets between $25,000 and $200,000.

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!)