CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-Jing Xu & Yehong Deng
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group-talks/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSSS Seminar - From Estimands to Robust Inference of Treatment Effects in Master Protocol Trials
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…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/s/91612004486. Campus room: 409. Accessibility Contact: csss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Seminar - Enduring Illegality: Time and the State of Waiting in Undocumented Middle Life - Angela Garcia
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…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wtrRLfCUShaM-cx7iXCuJQ#/. Campus room: 360. Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 15, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group-talks/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSSS Seminar - Almost Magic: The Promise and Pitfalls of AI-Assisted Coding
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…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/s/91612004486. Campus room: 409. Accessibility Contact: csss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Seminar - The Promises and Pitfalls of Social Scientific Instruction in U.S. Medical Schools - Lauren Olsen
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…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_56keS5XjThydaYu4w-9NnA#/registration. Campus room: 360. Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 22, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSDE Computational Demography Working Group-Jiahui Xu
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Raitt Hall (RAI). Online Meeting Link: https://csde.washington.edu/computational-demography-working-group-talks/. Campus room: 223. Accessibility Contact: csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.
For more info visit 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, 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.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM.
CSSS Seminar - One Model, Many Methods: NIMBLE for Hierarchical Statistical Modeling in Social and Other Sciences
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…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/s/91612004486. Campus room: 409. Accessibility Contact: csss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Seminar - Ice Geographies and Critical Demography - Jen Rose Smith
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…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2LFo6vFKRTejjGFahFF-Cw#/registration. Campus room: 360. Accessibility Contact: Maddie Farris - CSDE Program Coordinator (csde-prgm-coord@uw.edu). Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 29, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu. CSSS Seminar - Addressing Measurement Error Bias in Grouped Continuous Data for Causal Inferences
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…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/s/91612004486. Campus room: 409. Accessibility Contact: csss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, June 3, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csss.uw.edu. CSDE Closing Reception 2026: Celebration of Trainees' Accomplishments
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.
Friday, June 5, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
For more info visit csde.washington.edu.