College of Arts and Sciences Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

NO CSDE SEMINAR: Population Association of America Annual Meeting 2026

Friday, May 8, 2026

No CSDE Seminar as CSDE staff, faculty, affiliates, and trainees are at the PAA conference in St. Louis on Friday, May 8th, 2026

Event interval: Single day event
Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu)
Event Types: Not Specified
More info: csde.washington.edu…

CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-Jing Xu & Yehong Deng

Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 10 – 11 a.m. PDT

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI)
Online Meeting Link: csde.washington.edu…
Campus room: 223
Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu
Event Types: Workshops
More info: csde.washington.edu…

CSSS Seminar - From Estimands to Robust Inference of Treatment Effects in Master Protocol Trials

Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. PDT

Ting Ye, Assistant Professor, Department of Biostatistics, UW
Wednesday, May 13th, 2026 - 12:30 pm

Abstract:
A platform trial is an innovative clinical trial design that uses a master protocol to evaluate multiple treatments, where patients are often assigned to different subsets of treatment arms based on individual characteristics, enrollment timing, and treatment availability. While offering increased flexibility, this constrained and non-uniform treatment assignment poses inferential challenges, with two fundamental ones being the precise definition of treatment effects and robust, efficient inference on these effects. Such challenges arise primarily because some commonly used analysis approaches may target estimands defined on populations inadvertently depending on randomization ratios or trial operation format, thereby undermining interpretability. This article, for the first time, presents a formal framework for constructing a clinically meaningful estimand with precise specification of the population of interest. Specifically, the proposed entire concurrently eligible (ECE) population not only preserves the integrity of randomized comparisons but also remains invariant to both the randomization ratio and trial operation format. Then, we develop weighting and post-stratification methods to estimate treatment effects under the same minimal assumptions used in traditional randomized trials. We also consider model-assisted covariate adjustment to fully unlock the efficiency potential of platform trials while maintaining robustness against model misspecification. For all proposed estimators, we derive asymptotic distributions and propose robust variance estimators and compare them in theory and through simulations. The SIMPLIFY trial, a master protocol assessing continuation versus discontinuation of two common therapies in cystic fibrosis, is utilized to further highlight the practical significance of this research. All analyses are conducted using the R package RobinCID.

Ting Ye is an Assistant Professor in Biostatistics at the University of Washington. Her research aims to accelerate human health advances through data-driven discovery, development, and delivery of clinical, medical, and scientific breakthroughs, spanning the design and analysis of complex innovative clinical trials, causal inference in biomedical big data, and quantitative medical research.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV)
Online Meeting Link: washington.zoom.us…
Campus room: 409
Accessibility Contact: csss@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
More info: csss.uw.edu…

CSDE Seminar - Enduring Illegality: Time and the State of Waiting in Undocumented Middle Life - Angela Garcia

Friday, May 15, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. PDT

Speaker: Angela Garcia, Associate Professor of Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, The University of Chicago

Abstract: How does the state govern immigrant lives not only through law, but through time? This book talk centers “illegality” as a temporal mechanism of U.S. migration governance: by withholding broad pathways to legal status, the state sustains prolonged legal uncertainty, blocked mobility, and restricted cross-border movement that structure the life course. Drawing on three waves of longitudinal interviews with long-settled undocumented Mexican immigrants in Chicago, the talk traces how those who migrated as young adults enter middle life in a condition of legal and temporal suspension that coincides with peak responsibility for others—raising children in the United States while supporting aging parents from afar. Examining the undocumented “sandwich generation,” the talk shows how family caregiving is reorganized through prolonged legal uncertainty: strain concentrates when children are young, responsibilities shift onto adolescents as they age, and care for parents abroad becomes coordinated long-distance support marked by the emotional costs of absence, even as immigrants’ own later-life security remains uncertain. By centering time as a tool of migration governance, the talk offers a structural account of how immigration policy produces inequality that outlasts any single reform or administration, embedding waiting, deferral, and constrained mobility across the arc of adulthood.

Bio: Angela S. García is Associate Professor at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, with affiliations in Sociology and Comparative Human Development. Her research examines international immigration, law, and membership, focusing on migration governance and the shaping of immigrants’ long-term life chances. Her first book, Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law (University of California Press 2019), compares how restrictive and accommodating local immigration contexts reorganize undocumented life and drive strategies of “passing” within uneven legal landscapes. Her second book, Enduring Illegality: Time and the State of Waiting in Undocumented Middle Life (University of California Press 2026), shows how the state uses time as a mechanism of immigration control, with prolonged legal uncertainty shaping the life course into middle age through deferred futures and constrained caregiving, work, and health trajectories. García currently studies documentation and municipal ID programs across cities in the Americas and Europe, focusing on urban inclusion, administrative justice, and policy diffusion. She earned a PhD in Sociology and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, San Diego, where she was affiliated with the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and the Mexican Migration Field Research Program.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR)
Online Meeting Link: washington.zoom.us…
Campus room: 360
Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu)
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: Population Health Initiative, Evans School of Public Policy & Governance
More info: csde.washington.edu…

CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-

Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 10 – 11 a.m. PDT

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI)
Online Meeting Link: csde.washington.edu…
Campus room: 223
Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu
Event Types: Workshops
More info: csde.washington.edu…

CSSS Seminar - Almost Magic: The Promise and Pitfalls of AI-Assisted Coding

Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. PDT

Joseph L Hellerstein, Senior Fellow, eScience Institute, Affiliate professor, Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Affiliate professor, Department of Bioengineering, UW
Wednesday, May 20th, 2026 - 12:30 pm

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence tools are democratizing programming, making computational research accessible to researchers who have little or no formal programming background. This seminar offers a practical introduction to programming with AI assistance, beginning with a brief history of how AI—and AI coding tools in particular—came to be. We then discuss practical considerations for programming with AI: how to work effectively with AI assistants, how to frame problems clearly, and how to evaluate the code they produce. The foregoing skills are essential in addressing “technical debt” in AI-assisted programming, where generated code does not generalize easily to new features. The talk should provide insights into what AI-assisted programming can and cannot do, and a foundation for using AI tools responsibly.

Joseph L. Hellerstein received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Los Angeles. He has thirty years of experience in research and software engineering at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Microsoft Corp. and Google. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to the control engineering of computer system performance, and has approximately 200 peer-reviewed publications. At the eScience Institute, his primary focus is on AI-assisted software engineering. His role in the Department of Bioengineering is teaching and research related to mechanistic models of biological systems.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV)
Online Meeting Link: washington.zoom.us…
Campus room: 409
Accessibility Contact: csss@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
More info: csss.uw.edu…

CSDE Seminar - The Promises and Pitfalls of Social Scientific Instruction in U.S. Medical Schools - Lauren Olsen

Friday, May 22, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. PDT

Speaker: Lauren Olsen, Assistant Professor of College of Liberal Arts, Temple University

Abstract: Medical schools have increasingly incorporated the humanities and social sciences into their teaching, seeking to make future physicians more empathetic and more concerned with equity. In practice, however, these good intentions have not translated into critical consciousness. Humanities and social sciences education has often not only failed to deliver on its promise but even entrenched the inequalities that the medical profession set out to address.

Lauren D. Olsen examines how U.S. medical school faculty conceived, designed, and implemented their vision of education, tracing the failures of curricular reform. She argues that the way medical students encounter humanities and social sciences material in practice has served to reinforce the status quo by teaching them to individualize systemic problems. Students learn to avoid advocacy, critique, and attention to structural inequalities—while also gathering that it will be up to them to find coping strategies for problems from burnout to systemic racism. Olsen pinpoints the limitations of how clinical faculty understand the humanities and social sciences, arguing that in structuring and teaching courses, they assumed, reinforced, and glorified a white, elite model of the medical profession. Showing how deeply intertwined professional and social identities are in medical education, Curricular Injustice has significant implications for how occupations, organizations, and institutions shape understandings of inequality.

Bio: Lauren D. Olsen joined the Department of Sociology within the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University as a faculty member in 2019. Before starting as an Assistant Professor at Temple University, Dr. Olsen completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she also received her Master’s degree in the same field. Prior to that, she received her Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Religion from Columbia University. As a sociologist of medicine, Dr. Olsen’s award-winning research has been published in flagship journals, like the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, and Social Problems and has a new book out with Columbia University Press (2024), entitled Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities.

Dr. Olsen’s research lies at the intersection of the sociology of medicine, knowledge, education, culture, and social inequalities. Focusing on the case of U.S. medical education, she studies how educators, physicians, and policy makers apply knowledge to improve patient care and how the context in which these actors work impacts how they utilize knowledge. Dr. Olsen addresses questions about how these actors understand the sources of health and healthcare inequalities in the U.S. patient population, how they decide what kinds of knowledge are clinically relevant, and how they reproduce forms of inequality in their educational materials and interactional processes.

Building off of the research captured in her book, Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities, Dr. Olsen is currently engaged in research on premedical students’ experiences and expectations along their career path with a team of Temple University undergraduates, medical students’ and educators’ conceptualizations and engagements with “service learning” with physicians and social scientists at Lewis Katz School of Medicine, medical students plans to serve primarily underserved populations with colleague Laura Orrico, and medical school leaders’ institutional statements about national and local policies affecting their patients, students, and communities with a Temple University undergraduate.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR)
Online Meeting Link: washington.zoom.us…
Campus room: 360
Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu)
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: Population Health Initiative, Department of Bioethics and Humanities
More info: csde.washington.edu…

CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-Jiahui Xu

Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 10 – 11 a.m. PDT

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI)
Online Meeting Link: csde.washington.edu…
Campus room: 223
Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu
Event Types: Workshops
More info: csde.washington.edu…

Evans School Research Seminar - Amanda Bankston, Director of the Evans Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC) and Julia Karon, PhD Student, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington, "EPIC Reflections: Three Cases of Communit

Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. PDT

Wednesday, May 27, 11:30-12:30, PAR360: Amanda Bankston, Director of the Evans Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC) and Julia Karon, PhD Student, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington, "EPIC Reflections: Three Cases of Community-Engaged Research for Public Impact”

[This talk will describe empirical cases, and relates to the 4/1 session]

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR)
Campus room: 360
Accessibility Contact: cstruth@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars

CSSS Seminar - One Model, Many Methods: NIMBLE for Hierarchical Statistical Modeling in Social and Other Sciences

Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. PDT

Perry de Valpine, Professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, University of California, Berkeley
Wednesday, May 27th, 2026 - 12:30 pm

Abstract:
People often need to customize statistical models for particular problems and then consider a variety of methods for estimation and inference. Customizations may include adding components across space, time, repeated sampling, networks, non-parametric relationships or distributions, or multiple data sources, among others. Methods may include MCMC with potentially many kinds of samplers, empirical Bayes or marginal maximum likelihood, Laplace approximation and its extension to adaptive Gauss-Hermite quadrature, integrated nested Laplace approximation and related methods, sequential Monte Carlo, and others. Some methods represent hybrids, such as Particle MCMC combining particle filtering and MCMC. I will give an overview of the NIMBLE framework (R package nimble) for such problems. NIMBLE combines a language for writing models (an extension of the BUGS/JAGS language) and an algorithm programming system from R, in which all built-in algorithms are written and users can write new algorithms. Models and algorithms are automatically generated into C++ and compiled, and they can use derivatives of arbitrary order. NIMBLE has been used in over 600 peer-reviewed publications across many fields, with a center of gravity in ecology and environmental science. I will illustrate NIMBLE with a 2-parameter logistic item-response theory model with nonparametric distribution of abilities for education and health data and with a multi-species occupancy model of bird species distributions in California. The first example shows use of Bayesian nonparametric distributions, while the second shows configuration of MCMC samplers such as Barker, slice, and HMC along with comparisons to Laplace and INLA-like nested approximations. Finally I will point to future developments for NIMBLE, including greater scalability, better workflows, and better use from other packages.

Perry de Valpine is a mathematical and statistical ecologist. His research interests include population dynamics, theoretical ecology, and computational methods for fitting biologically realistic models to data. He is a lead developer of NIMBLE (r-nimble.org), a flexible computational system for hierarchical statistical modeling. He has contributed to modeling and data analysis of many systems in environmental science, including bird communities, large carnivore populations, agricultural insect dynamics, forest change, soil microbiomes, plant chemical diversity, fisheries, and more. De Valpine is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and teaches courses on statistical and mathematical modeling methods in ecology and environmental science.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV)
Online Meeting Link: washington.zoom.us…
Campus room: 409
Accessibility Contact: csss@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
More info: csss.uw.edu…

CSDE Seminar - Ice Geographies and Critical Demography - Jen Rose Smith

Friday, May 29, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. PDT

Speaker: Jen Rose Smith, Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Washington

Abstract: Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?

Bio: Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu) is assistant professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She works at the intersection of critical Indigenous studies, cultural human geography, and environmental humanities. Her book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity in the Arctic was published with Duke University Press and she has also published in EPD: Society and Space, The Geographical Journal, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She serves on the advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes language and cultural revitalization gatherings.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR)
Online Meeting Link: washington.zoom.us…
Campus room: 360
Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu)
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
Event sponsors: Population Health Initiative
More info: csde.washington.edu…

CSSS Seminar - Addressing Measurement Error Bias in Grouped Continuous Data for Causal Inferences

Wednesday, Jun 3, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. PDT

Ramses Llobet, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, UW
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026 - 12:30 pm

Abstract:
Applied researchers often analyze ordered categories that discretize continuous quantities (income, time frequencies, biomarkers, exposures). Treating such indices as continuous or imputing bin midpoints are convenient but misleading strategies to estimate marginal effects in regression analyses. This paper characterizes a form of measurement error that arises in those strategies by design, from the sampling mechanism, which induces biased and inconsistent estimations that are model-dependent and a priori unpredictable. I provide a solution to this problem, a calibration method - regularized interval regression - that treats responses as intervals of a latent distribution, and predicts calibrated proxies robust to measurement error biases in downstream linear regressions. Monte Carlo evidence shows that, relative to midpoint imputation and “ordinal-as-continuous,” the calibrated proxy yields unbiased linear estimates, especially in the presence of right-censoring/top-coding. An example based on survey income data illustrates the source of this measurement error but the approach generalizes to any grouped-continuous ordinal variables and has direct implications for observational and experimental designs that rely on ordinal treatment measurements.

Ramses is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Political Science, and research assistant at the CS&SS consulting service. His research interests are in political economy and methodology.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV)
Online Meeting Link: washington.zoom.us…
Campus room: 409
Accessibility Contact: csss@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars
More info: csss.uw.edu…

CSDE Closing Reception 2026: Celebration of Trainees' Accomplishments

Friday, Jun 5, 2026, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. PDT

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR)
Campus room: 320
Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu)
Event Types: Ceremonies
More info: csde.washington.edu…