News and Events, August 8, 2024

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The BPC and CEDA share several announcements. 

1. Congratulations to our very own Robert Chung, of UC Berkeley Demography, for winning the 2024 Pedagogy Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Methodology!! Robert Chung is a mathematical and statistical demographer whose research and teaching focus on formal demographic models and methods, analyzing imperfect data, and data visualization. Chung has had a long and varied career, in and out of academia, that has made demographic modeling come alive to students, policymakers, and health practitioners. He has been one of the leading teachers of demographic methods to demographers at Berkeley including through the Berkeley Workshop in Formal Demography, which trains dozens of graduate student and early-career demographers around the country each summer. Through his readiness to share teaching materials and converse about pedagogy—on concepts ranging from interdisciplinary applications of demographic models to the necessity of making demography a more welcoming and diverse discipline—Chung has also helped to develop excellent teaching of demography far outside his own program. Congratulations Robert!

2. CEDA invites pilot proposals for the 2025-2026 academic year, to be considered in its 6-year NIA center grant renewal. Proposals are due August 30, 2024.  Details are attached, and also available on our website. If you are in doubt about the suitability of your proposed research area within the CEDA funding priorities, or need any assistance in developing your proposal idea, please email the CEDA Director Will Dow, wdow@berkeley.edu to discuss.

3. Save the Date. Our first Brown Bag Seminar of the semester will be Wednesday, September 4th, with Peter Catron, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, who will present his research: “Contextual Boundaries: Skin Tone Stratification and Skill Transferability Among Mexicans in the Age of Mass Migration.” This is an in-person talk, 12pm, 310 Social Sciences. Event details here.

4. The organizing committee members of the PAA look forward to your submissions for the PAA 2025 Annual Meeting and can’t wait to host you in Washington, DC next spring, April 10 to April 13th. The Call for Papers is now available and the submission system will open August 15. The deadline for submissions is September 29. Read more. 

5. Feedback Wanted: Request for Information (RFI) on the National Institute on Aging (NIA) Strategic Directions for Research (NOT-AG-24-028).

6. Wondering about the new NIH Simplified Review Framework? Learn how to prepare for it here. 

See further announcements and opportunities below.

WORKSHOPS, CONFERENCES

1. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is hosting a two-day workshop on “Identifying Midlife Social Exposures that Might Modify Risk for Cognitive Impairment Associated with Early Life Disadvantage.” Early life disadvantages have been associated with a higher risk of dementia, but the risk may be modified by early life and midlife exposures. While attention is often given to individuals’ behavior and choices, structural and institutional forces may be more effective in addressing inequities. This workshop will examine what measures, data infrastructure needs, and analytic measures can advance understanding of how midlife social exposures can address early life risk factors.

This public workshop will discuss the state of knowledge and identify conceptual approaches to guide research on better understanding midlife exposures that may be modifiable in reducing the risk of later-life dementia. Dates: August 29-30, 2024. Register and learn more.

2. The 14th Alpine Population Conference Call for Papers. Alp-Pop 2025 is now open for submission for papers for its 14th annual population conference, to be held January 12-15th, 2025. The conference brings together scholars interested in population issues across several disciplines, including demography, economics, epidemiology, political science, sociology and psychology. The conference emphasizes empirical rigor and innovation over a given topic or geographical area, and meets the challenges of interdisciplinary and international audiences.  Alp-Pop scholars confer both formally and informally. A traditional conference program (paper and poster presentations) mixes with group activities in a world-class winter resort. The conference location, the Hotel Planibel in La Thuile (Aosta Valley), is next to the ski-slopes, and is in close proximity to the airports of Geneva and Torino/Milano. The deadline to submit is September 23, 2024. Submit your paper here. See attached flyer for further details. 

3. Reminder: Abstract submissions for the 30th International Population Conference (IPC2025), which will be held in Brisbane, Australia from July 13-18, 2025, are now open. The IUSSP’s International Population Conference is the world’s largest international scientific conference on population issues and research, and takes place once every 4 years. Review the list of conference themes and member-organized session topics in the Call for Papers to identify the theme or session topics that most closely fit your paper topic and read the instructions to have all the required information for your submission prepared in advance. IPC2025 submission website: https://ipc2025.popconf.org/ . The language of the conference will be English and IUSSP encourages submissions in English – but will be flexible with submissions in French – especially from African colleagues. Deadline to submit abstract: September 15 2024.

4. Registration for the Social Science History Association (SSHA) conference, to be held in Toronto, October 31 – November 3, 2024, is open and available at https://ssha.org/conference/.  It is obligatory to register if you are presenting a paper at the conference. You may also select here to register for SSHA 2024.  We are once again offering an early-bird registration fee option, which ends on August 29.  Be sure to register early to take advantage of the early-bird fee reduction. To sign up for an SSHA membership, please visit the SSHA membership registration website.

FUNDING

1. RFA-OD-24-010. Building Sustainable Software Tools for Open Science (R03 Clinical Trial Not Allowed). The purpose of this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) is to enhance the sustainability and impact of research software tools by enabling the use of best practices and design principles in software development and by leveraging continuing advances in computing. This NOFO is also expected to facilitate the creation of vibrant partnerships between developers and users of software and tools, and to promote FAIR practices for research software to maximize research value.  First available: November 04, 2024.

2. PAR-24-256. Archiving and Documenting Child Health and Human Development Data Sets (R03 Clinical Trial Not Allowed). The purpose of this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) is to support the archiving and documentation of existing data sets within the scientific mission of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in order to enable secondary analysis of these data by the scientific community. The highest priority is to archive original data collected with NICHD funding. Due October 16, 2024; February 16, 2025; June 16, 2025.

3. PAR-24-250. Standardizing Data and Metadata from Wearable Devices (R01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed). Wearable technology shows promise in providing information that can be used to create biomarkers of various diagnostic groups that have relevance to mental illness. However, there are barriers related to multiple and sometimes proprietary data standards that make data aggregation difficult from existing devices. The purpose of this Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is to support the creation of standards for data as well as metadata and related coordination activities that will allow researchers to easily access data from personal tracking devices and integrate those data for subsequent data analysis. The recipients will be expected to partner with device manufacturers, the researcher community, and other interested parties such as ethics experts if the effort is going to be successful.  It is expected that the recipient will create standards for personal tracking device data that serve the same purpose as the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) or Neuroimaging Informatics Technology Initiative (NIfTI) formats and standards do for medical image files. Those medical image file standards have allowed secondary data analysis and have resulted in many software packages and workflows for secondary data analysis. Due June 10, 2025.

4. The Division of Behavioral and Social Research of the NIA has recently published or joined the following new Requests for Applications (RFAs), Program Announcements (PARs), Notices of Special Interest (NOSIs), and Request for Information (RFI), of interest to BPC and CEDA affiliates:

5. Additionally, NIH recently released a notice about upcoming changes to the application and review criteria for R and F grants and T32 reporting tables, among other things:

Overview of Grant Application and Review Changes for Due Dates on or after January 25, 2025.

CALL FOR PAPERS

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences invites submissions for an issue on “Moving Beyond Deaths of Despair: Understanding Rising Mortality and Morbidity among Americans without College Degrees.” Scholars are encouraged to submit proposals that address the questions of what explains the growing educational divide in physical and mental health and what this widening means for the lives of Americans without college degrees. The editors expect that many of the papers will directly address differences in mortality, including not only drug abuse, alcohol-related disease, and suicide but also major causes of death such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. They also encourage papers that will encompass topics as diverse as the changing labor market; social class; gender, racial, ethnic perspectives; studies of family and personal life; spatial variation; political processes; and social policy. The issue will be edited by Anne Case, Princeton University;  Andrew J. Cherlin, Johns Hopkins University; and Angus Deaton, Princeton University. 

Prospective contributors should submit a CV and an abstract (up to two pages in length, single or double spaced) of their study along with up to two pages of supporting material (e.g., tables, figures, pictures, etc.) no later than 5 PM EST on September 4, 2024 to: https://rsf.fluxx.io. Questions about the issue should be addressed to Suzanne Nichols, Director of Publications, at journal@rsage.org; please do not contact the editors directly. More details available here. 

Berkeley Population Center

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