When:  Friday, Feb 13, 2026 (12:30 - 1:30 PM)
     Where:  Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom

We are looking forward to hosting Kristin Perkins from Georgetown University on Friday, February 13 in Parrington Hall 360 and on Zoom. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Population Health Initiative and the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance. Follow this link to sign up for a 1:1 meeting with Dr. Perkins during her visit on February 13th.

Where U.S. public supports fall short of need, individuals often turn to the private safety net – instrumental support from family and friends. Although impacts of the public safety net are well-documented, less research considers how the private safety net shapes patterns of hardship. Focusing on the case of older adults’ shared households, this study demonstrates how the provision and receipt of private safety net support shapes housing costs and, ultimately, our understanding of the contours of the housing affordability crisis. Using Survey of Income and Program Participation data, we find that 15% of older adults are hosts, who share their home with others, and 6% are guests, who live in someone else’s home. Counterfactual estimates reveal that guests pay $713 less a month on housing than they would in nonshared housing, and hosts pay $53 more. Without shared households, an additional 5% of older adults would experience cost burdens, and racial disparities would be up to 400% larger. Our findings illustrate that private safety net support is an important component of the U.S. social safety net: taking this support for granted risks obscuring the level of need – and disparities in needs – that are left by the private market.

CSDE Trainee Natalie Turner (Social Work), CSDE Affiliate Tracy Mroz (Rehabilitation Medicine), and Amber Sabbatini (Emergency Medicine) recently published an article titled, “Characteristics Associated With Home Health Care Referral After Discharge From Hospital.”  This study used data on Medicare beneficiaries to examine individual, hospital, and community characteristics associated with institutional post-acute care vs. home health care (HHC), which is often preferred by older adults. Older age, longer length of stay,  urban dwelling, and identifying as non-Hispanic White were associated with lower rates of HHC referral. Large (>400 beds), nonteaching, and safety net hospitals were associated with higher rates of HHC referral. Communities with higher percentages of racially and ethnically minoritized residents and older adults had higher rates of HHC referral. However, models explained only 13% of the variation in post-acute care referral.

CSDE Affiliate Jing Xu (Anthropology) and co-authors recently published an article in the Journal of Adolescent Research, titled “Exploring Facilitators and Disruptors of Polarization During Adolescence Within Contested Settings: A Case Study of Catholic and Protestant Youth in Northern Ireland.” Xu and her collaborators draw on interview data to identify key socializing actors and settings within established theoretical frameworks: Ecological Systems Theory, Social Identity, and Intergroup Contact. Findings reveal the importance of family, friends, school, and media as intersecting socializing actors for adolescents. Intergroup contact among peers from different ethno-religious backgrounds disrupted adolescents’ engagement in polarizing and divisive rhetoric. Lastly, adolescents perceived educational actors and settings as less influential than their personal connections to peers and family.

 CSDE Affiliate Cynthia Chen (Civil & Environmental Engineering) published two studies that show untapped capacity for community resilience through place-based peer-to-peer (P2P) resource sharing. Both studies use data from two socioeconomically different communities in Seattle. First, in an article in Nature Cities, Chen demonstrated that under a 5-day isolation scenario, place-based P2P sharing can reduce a community’s resilience loss by 13.4–100%; on average, 22–44 social ties per household support an 80% sharing rate of surplus resources.  In a related paper in Transportation Research, Chen simulated and compared the efficacy of a P2P decentralized scheme involving sharing captains (residents that take on the role of distributing resources among neighbors) against the status quo fixed-point distribution method that relies on residents to come and get resources. The decentralized P2P strategy reached 100% resource coverage faster. Moreover, while the success of P2P strategy lies fundamentally on residents’ willingness to share, a satisfactory outcome can be reached even when a substantial share of residents (40%) is unwilling to share with anybody.

With support from the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) and funding from NICHD, CSDE has launched a six month program to forge and strengthen partnerships between public-serving organizations in Washington and UW researchers.  The initiative begins with a call for applications from public-serving organizations in Washington due February 20.  Please visit our landing page to learn more.  If you are a UW researcher who has connections to public-serving organizations,  please let us know by filling out this form. 

Each quarter, CSDE offers 3-5 workshops on data sources, statistical and biomarker methodology, introductions to analysis programs, and more, all given by CSDE staff and faculty affiliates. These workshops can include hands-on training in novel methods and programming, lectures on innovative data sources, and discussions of important issues in research and data collection. Over the course of the academic year, CSDE will offer a diverse and exciting set of workshops, some of which will be offered in person and others remotely via Zoom.

• Text as Data and LLM applications
  
  • Date & Time:  Tuesday, Feb 10 @ 10:00AM–11:30PM
  • Instructors: June Yang
• Probabilistic Population Projections I: Theory
  
  • Date & Time: Tuesday, Feb 24 @ 9:00AM–10:30AM
  • Instructor: Hana Ševčíková
• Probabilistic Population Projections II: Practice
  
  • Date & Time: Thursday, Feb 26 @ 9:00AM–10:30AM
  • Instructor: Hana Ševčíková

The NIH will be accepting applications under the new multi-component award structure. Please see PA 26-002 “NIH Collaborative International Research Project (Parent PF5 Clinical Trial Optional)” for more details.

This year, the ICPSR Data Fair will take place during Love Data Week 2026, joining a global celebration of data, research, and open science. The ICPSR Data Fair offers tools, training, and inspiration for the worldwide data community. ICPSR’s events focus on data sharing, research methods, metadata, AI & privacy, scholarships, demos, and more!

The University of Washington Department of Sociology is pleased to host Jack Goldstone, the Virginia E and John T. Hazel Jr. Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow of the Mercatus Center, to join us for a SocSEM event on Thursday, February 12, 2026 at 12:30 pm, in Savery Hall room 409.

Goldstone will focus on the seriousness of an aging population. Europe, the Americas and Asia will soon have the oldest populations known to humanity. Can we cope? He will lead a discussion on the changes that will be needed in the future to avoid disaster, including ways we thing about youth, women, immigration, and globalization. He will also discuss his new book 10 Billion: How Aging, Immigration, Women and Youth will Change the World in the 21st Century which will be published by Oxford University Press.

Join the Ohio Population Consortium on February 12 at 12 pm EST for the second of three webinars in a series on “Fertility Goals: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Implications for Science and Policy“. CSDE External Affiliate Jamaica Corker (BMGF) is one of four panelist speaking on new indicators of sexual and reproductive health. Register for Zoom link.

Applications are open for the NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Early Career Workshop. This opportunity provides early stage investigators with training on how to transform their research ideas into competitive NIH grant applications. The workshop includes strategies for developing strong NIH proposals, navigating the peer review process, and building a professional network to support a successful research career. The application submission deadline is February 13, 2026, at 11:59 p.m.

On February 18th from 10-11AM PST, the UW Computational Demography Working Group will host Dr. Changjie Chen (University of Florida). Dr. Chen will deliver a talk titled :Urban digital twins: An emerging computational framework for making sense of cities.”  The talk will be held both in person at Raitt 223 and via zoom.  A sign-up link is here for Dr. Chen to meet CSDE affiliated students and researchers 1 on 1 during his visit.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is requesting public input on its proposal to establish harmonized and transparent policy requirements for protecting human participant research data. Specifically, NIH proposes to: (1) establish policy requirements for which data should be controlled-access under NIH data sharing policies, and (2)  revise the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy to simplify and harmonize requirements. The full proposal can be found here. Stakeholders are invited to provide feedback on the policy proposals as described in the request for information.

Organization: UW Civic Health Initiative

Award amount: $2,000-$25,000

Sponsor deadline: 02/06/2026

Description:  The University of Washington Civic Health Initiative has released a funding call for three different categories of small grants. These grant programs are designed to foster new collaborations and innovations that strengthen civic health and democratic institutions nationwide. Innovations proposed for funding to these grant programs must align with one or more of the areas of focus for the Initiative’s work. (read more)

The Office of Research invites applications for the next round of the Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grant program. Proposals are due to RRF by Monday, March 2, at 5:00 PM.  However, Departments and Colleges/Schools may have earlier deadlines, so all applicants are advised to check with their program’s administrative staff. The CAS Dean’s office requests proposals be submitted to their office by 5pm, Thursday, February 26th. Proposals that arrive to Office of Research 3-4 business days before the deadline guarantees that the RRF staff have time to review and provide feedback on proposals. The Office of Research will host Zoom Office Hours at 1pm on Friday, February 13; Wednesday, February 18; and Wednesday, February 25. PI Eligibility guidance is documented for the RRF Program and for the College.

ICPSR is now accepting scholarship applications for the 2026 ICPSR Summer Program! These scholarships provide fee waivers for one of our General Sessions, a four week program that includes methods Courses plus math and computing Lectures. In addition to fee waivers, some scholarships also provide support for in-person participation, including on-campus housing and meals. For details on each scholarship and the application process, please visit ICPSR’s scholarship page. The deadline to apply for an ICPSR scholarship is March 1.

The 12th Annual Workshop on Formal Demography will be held in person at UC Berkeley from June 1 – 5, 2026, with funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R25HD083136) and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Population Center. Apply here by March 1, 2026.

Submit your work for the 2026 Annual IAPHS Conference in Portland, OR!

Theme: Reimagining Population Health Science to Build Trust and Influence​
​Dates: September 29 – October 2, 2026
​Submission Window: December 2, 2025 – March 10, 2026

IAPHS is currently seeking abstract reviewers and is accepting Student Travel Scholarship applications until March 8. 

Award amount: $200,000

Sponsor deadline: 03/11/2026

Program description: The Russell Sage Foundation’s (RSF) program on Social, Political, and Economic Inequality supports innovative research on the factors that contribute to social, political, and economic inequalities in the U.S., and the extent to which those inequalities affect social, political, psychological, and economic outcomes such as educational and labor market access and opportunities, social and economic mobility within and across generations, and civic participation and representation.  (read more)

The Population Council invites applications for Editors, Population & Development Review (PDR). Individual applications as well as applications for Co-Editor teams that pair senior scholars working with mid-career scholars are welcomed by March 16, 2026. Two Editors will be appointed for a three-year term, beginning January 1, 2027. The term can be extended to five years total at the discretion of the Council.

Organization: William T. Grant Scholars Program 2026 (Limited Submission Opportunity)

Award amount:  Each Scholar receives exactly $425,000 over five years, including up to 7.5% indirect costs. Awards begin July 1 of the award year and are made to the applicant’s institution.

UW internal deadline: 03/18/2026

Description: 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. (read more)

Award amount: $100,000

Sponsor deadline: 04/01/2026

Program description: The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF), in collaboration with the Criminal Justice program at Arnold Ventures (AV) is pleased to announce its first annual grants competition for early-career scholars. Our goal is to cultivate a pipeline of researchers conducting causal research on the criminal justice system. Criminal justice policies and practices include the work of 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. (read more)

The Vienna Yearbook of Population Research welcomes submissions for a Special Issue on “Demographic perspectives on migration”. Submit your manuscript until May 15, 2026.

The editors invite contributions expanding the state-of-the-art knowledge and methodological approaches across a broad range of migration topics, including trends and spatial patterns, innovative data and methods, socio-economic inequalities, drivers of mobility and immobility, climate-related and crisis-driven migration, and links between migration and family or health outcomes.

Societal Impacts interviewed their four Associate Editors to share more about their research background and motivations to join the journal’s editorial team.  Societal Impacts is an open access, peer-reviewed journal, which publishes brief articles that describe the societal impacts of research projects. The journal serves as a platform for papers demonstrating steps towards resolving major challenges, like climate change and inequality, and delivering on global initiatives, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

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.

Several new data sets have been added to the platform in the last few months. TenderAlpha features global government procurement data from over a dozen countries dating back to 2010. Veridion Core Company Profiles features comprehensive coverage of private companies and SMEs, populations typically underrepresented in public company datasets. LobbyingData provides federal U.S. lobbying data from 1999-present.

Organization: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Technology Program

Award amount: Undisclosed; Most projects funded between 50K to 600K Sponsor deadline: Rolling deadline.

Description: The Foundation’s Technology grantmaking aims to leverage advances in technology to benefit the research community. This includes three sub programs: (1) Exploratory Grantmaking in Technology; (2) Open Source in Science; and (3) Scientific Collaboration.  The RFP can be found here. Interested grantseekers should email a letter of inquiry of no more than two pages to technology@sloan.org. (read more)

The Center for Social Science Computation and Research (CSSCR) is offering seven workshops during Winter 2026 Quarter, open to all members of the UW community, whether student, faculty or staff.  See a full list with workshop descriptions and registration links here. 

CSSS provides free statistical consulting to current UW faculty, staff, and students working on social science problems.  They offer guidance at any stage of a project — from study design and planning through the selection and interpretation of statistical models. During Winter 2026 quarter, CSSS has two consulting options: scheduled appointments and drop-in sessions. See further details on the CSSS website.