Big News: We are thrilled to announce that Jenna Nobles will join the Demography Faculty as Full Professor in Fall 2024! Welcome, Jenna!!

As this week we are in Columbus, Ohio for PAA, we will not have our usual brown bag seminar. Our last talk of the academic year will be on May 1, 12pm, with Andreas Backhaus. Andreas will present his research on “The Fertility of Refugees in Germany.”

A new report from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine calls for a national data infrastructure to produce more accurate and consistent data and statistics about household income, wealth, and consumption. Coordination would improve data on economic disparities and better inform research to understand patterns of well-being and the economic impacts of policies. Read more.

See further announcements and opportunities below. 

EVENTS

April 15  | 2-3:30pm | UC Berkeley Sociology Colloquium | John N. Robinson III, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Princeton University. “Banking on Dystopia:  The Story of Affordable Housing in Desperate Times.”  402 Social Sciences Building. Zoom link. Meeting ID: 982 0187 0383 Passcode: 899500 Event details.

April 16 | 12:10-1pm |  UC Berkeley School of Public Health | Latest in Public Health Research Series | “Adaptive Experiments Toward Learning Treatment Effect Heterogeneity,” with Jingshen Wang, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, School of Public Health. Zoom link to the talk can be found here.

FUNDING

Deadline Extended: PAR-22-233 (Time-Sensitive Opportunities for Health Research). The  deadline for the funding opportunity, Time-Sensitive Opportunities for Health Research (PAR-22-233), has been extended for an additional year. This funding opportunity aims to expedite the review and award process to support research focused on understanding health outcomes related to unexpected or time-sensitive events, such as emergent environmental threats and pandemics or changes in local, state, or national policies, as well as natural disasters. Applicants must demonstrate the time-sensitivity of their proposed research due to a limited window of opportunity to gather baseline data, address key research questions, or prospectively evaluate new policies or programs. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until March 2, 2025.

Reissued: NIH Director’s New Innovator Award Program (DP2). The NIH Director’s New Innovator Award Program supports early stage investigators of exceptional creativity who propose bold and highly innovative research projects with the potential to produce a major impact on broad, important areas relevant to the mission of NIH. This opportunity is designed specifically to support unusually creative investigators with bold and highly innovative research ideas at an early stage of their career when they may lack the preliminary data required for a conventional R01 grant application. Next application due date: August 19, 2024.

CONFERENCES, WORKSHOPS

Demystifying Machine Learning for Population Researchers. With this workshop we aim to clarify the goals, techniques, and applications of machine learning methods for population research. The workshop will be held on November 5-6 at the MPIDR. We invite submission of original research abstract with relevance to ML and population sciences (max. 500 words) and a CV (max. one page) to MLworkshop@demogr.mpg.de. Submission deadline: April 30, 2024.

 Please direct any questions to MLworkshop@demogr.mpg.de. You can read more about the workshop here and here.

The Network for Data-Intensive Research on Aging (NDIRA), a collaboration between the University of Minnesota Life Course Center and IPUMS invites you to participate in the 2024 Data-Intensive Research Conference, being held July 31-August 1 in Minneapolis, MN and online. The conference will feature research presentations and discussions related to the 2024 theme: Harnessing the Power of Linked Data to Study Aging. The featured work leverages linkages with large-scale population data to explore issues related to:

• Place-based exposures and outcomes
• Intersections of work, family, and community participation
• Later life-course population trends
• Structural disparities in life course processes
• Intergenerational linkages

Applications for two pre-conference workshops (held in-person July 29-30) are open through April 24:

• Data Linkages with IPUMS MEPS
• Linking with IPUMS Full Count Census Data 

We welcome any questions about the conference or workshop at ndira@umn.edu.

CALL FOR PAPERS

1. We are pleased to invite submissions for a special issue of Canadian Studies in Population on Demographic Change and Challenges in the Americas. Our special issue will spotlight key demographic concerns facing the Americas, including migration, mortality and morbidity, fertility, and family dynamics, and provide a forward-looking introduction that sets an agenda for a more integrated approach to understanding demographic change in the region. We seek papers that address demographic processes in the Americas, broadly defined, from Canada to Patagonia. Our issue is motivated by the following core questions about demography in the Americas:

• What are the most important emerging demographic trends and processes in the Americas?
• How do demographic processes in the Americas challenge or bring nuance to understanding of processes found elsewhere?
• Are there regional demographic systems in the Americas? Are national demographic trends emblematic of regional trends? How heterogeneous is the demography of countries and regions?
• Are similar demographic dynamics/mechanisms evident across places (i.e., changing mortality risks or fertility decline)?
• How do national policies relate to unique demographic outcomes?

Papers may focus on a specific country or identify links and demographic systems between countries or regions. We invite papers that present novel empirical evidence, methodological insights or theoretical contributions. Empirical papers may include descriptive findings or center on identifying mechanisms. Authors are encouraged to situate their findings in regional context if they are not explicitly comparative in nature. Visit the Call for Papers.

2. Spatial Demography (Springer Nature) is soliciting manuscripts for a forthcoming Topical Collection on Climate and Health.https://link.springer.com/collections/jdhbdjabga . We seek high-quality articles that utilize spatial concepts, data, and methods to inform our understanding of the population dynamics of climate change and its impacts on human health and wellbeing as specified in UN Sustainable Development Goal #3 (SDG). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2022 Report, climate change impacts health processes and outcomes directly, via pathways such as extreme weather, indirectly, via increased exposure to pollution, allergens, and disease vectors, and structurally, via social and economic disruption, all of which disproportionately impact already marginalized and vulnerable populations. Global warming is projected to continue over the coming decades, ultimately leading to a drastic increase in the global temperature. This, in turn, will contribute to continued increases in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, impacts on food and water quality and distribution, infectious disease spread, increases in air pollution and allergens, forced migration, civil disruption, mental illness, and premature mortality.

Mitigating these impacts requires greater understanding of the ways in which climate change drives population disease, health disparities, and mortality, as well as the ways in which populations are responding to the effects of climate change to safeguard human health. In this context, we are interested in submissions that examine population health dynamics in relation to/resulting from climate change, such as treatments of the following topics:

• Health consequences of forced migration (SDG 10): due to increasing disaster frequency/intensity, worsening air pollution, heat intensification, water scarcity, sea level rise, etc.
• Climate justice (SDGs 1, 4, 5, 7-8, 10): disproportionate impacts of climate change on marginalized populations.
• Resilience and adaptation (SDGs 9, 11): strategies being used by populations impacted by climate to mitigate damage.
• Child development, aging and mortality (SDGs 1-11): increased premature mortality among aging populations/increased risk of disease among children due to extreme weather events, extreme heat, pollution, agricultural shock, water and food scarcity, etc.
• Infectious disease (SDGs 2, 6, 9-11): due to changes in vector ecology, temperature, water and food supply.
• Mental illness (SDGs 1-8, 10, 11): impacts of climate anxiety, severe weather losses, forced migration, civil conflict.

The topical collection will be coordinated by O Kim (Korea University, South Korea – e-mail: oskim@korea.ac.kr) and Louisa Holmes (Penn State, USA – email: lmholmes@psu.edu) with editorial support from Stephen A. Matthews (Penn State, USA – e-mail: sxm27@psu.edu). Please feel free to reach out to the organizers about the suitability of a manuscript for this topical collection. We particularly welcome submissions from researchers based on diverse regions and contexts and interdisciplinary submissions that integrate spatial demography with other social science fields .Please submit your manuscript through the Springer Editorial Manager system, with a note on the cover letter stating that the submission is for consideration for the Topical Collection on Climate and Health.

*************************************************