The Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brains Sciences (FABBS) is circulating a community sign-on letter urging Congress to sustain funding for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the FY 2026 appropriations process. The letter emphasizes the importance of retaining the Senate’s report language supporting the Directorate and underscores the value of SBE research across the federal science enterprise. Review the letter, and add your organization’s name here. The deadline is November 5, 2025.

The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) Standing Committee on Demographic Terminology seeks help editing and updating a new multilingual Ontology of Demography. The new ontology builds on many years of work by IUSSP members from the Multilingual Dictionaries of Demography first published in 1958 to Demopaedia, the online encyclopedia. The Ontology of Demography includes more than 1,600 terms in a machine-actionable format with definitions in fifteen languages.  Help is sought from experienced demographers to update definitions and describe relationships between terms. Please contact George Alter (altergc@umich.edu) if you are interested.

This week’s brownbag seminar is on Wednesday, November 5th, 12pm, with Hal Caswell, Emeritus Research Scholar in Biology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Professor of Mathematical Demography and Ecology at the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Caswell will present “Inequality in Demographic Outcomes: Contributions of Multiple Social, Biological, and Environmental Factors.” The event will take place in room 310 in the Social Sciences Building and will also be available via zoom. See the full event details here. Our YouTube channel is here. Visit our Brown Bag event page for both past and upcoming talks here.

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Featured affiliate research of the week: Comparison of Initial Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Final Physician Recommendations in AI-Assisted Virtual Urgent Care Visits. 2025. Dan Zeltzer, Zehavi Kugler, Lior Hayat, Tamar Brufman, Ran Ilan Ber, Keren Leibovich, Tom Beer, Ilan Frank, Ran Shaul, Caroline Goldzweig, and Joshua Pevnick. Annals of Internal Medicine.

See further announcements and opportunities below.

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EVENTS

November 3 | 2-3:30pm | Sociology Department Colloquium Series | Sanyu Mojola, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University. “Death by Design: Producing Racial Health Inequality in the Shadow of the Capitol.” Hybrid event: 402 Social Sciences Building & via zoom (zoom link here).

November 3 | 4-5:30pm | Matrix on Point: Spaces for Thriving | The panel will feature 

You-Tien Hsing, Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; Sally Augustin, Lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces and Principal at Design With Science; and Karen Nakamura, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Disability Studies Lab at UC Berkeley. Meredith Sadin, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and Senior Researcher at the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab, will moderate. 820 Social Sciences Building. Register here.

November 3 | 5-6pm | Institute for the Study of Societal Issues | Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “The Path Towards Authoritarianism.” 2111 Bancroft Way, #104. Register here.

November 5 | 12-1:05pm |  UC Berkeley Demography Seminar Series | Hal Caswell, Emeritus Research Scholar in Biology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Professor of Mathematical Demography and Ecology at the University of Amsterdam, will present, “Inequality in Demographic Outcomes: Contributions of Multiple Social, Biological, and Environmental Factors.” The event will take place in Room 310 in the Social Sciences Building and will also be available via zoom.

Meeting ID: 985 2901 0198.

Password: DEMOG_BB

See the full event details here. 

FUNDING

Dissertation Fellowships on Gender in the Economy. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)’s Gender in the Economy group, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is offering three dissertation fellowships for doctoral students in economics and allied fields to encourage research on gender issues in the economies of developing and/or developed nations. Fellows will be expected to participate in the Gender in the Economy meetings at the NBER Summer Institute. Deadline: January 6, 2026. Learn more and apply. 

Grand Challenges (GC) requests for proposals (RFPs):

• Accelerating the Development of Innovative, Exceptionally Low-Cost Maternal and Child Nutrient Ingredients and Products. Despite decades of evidence demonstrating the importance of nutrition interventions, many solutions are inaccessible in low- and middle-income countries due to high costs. We invite innovators from nutrition, biotechnology, food technology, pharmaceuticals, and beyond to submit proposals to reduce the cost of calcium, choline, or DHA by at least half or develop low-cost and/or advanced micronutrient supplement products.
• Accelerating Innovation in Vaginal Formulations in Support of Women’s Health. Local delivery of drugs into the vagina offers several clear potential advantages over other delivery methods, but it remains underutilized. Through this RFP, the partners seek applications that either contribute to the development of vaginal formulations that promote optimal drug delivery or identify the specific features of a vaginally administered product that would most appeal to women. This challenge is a collaboration among members of global Grand Challenges network, including the Gates Foundation, GC-Africa (managed by the Science for Africa Foundation), GC-Brazil (Ministry of Health), GC-India (Department of Biotechnology under the Ministry of Science and Technology), and GC-South Africa (South African Medical Research Council).

Applications for both RFPs are due no later than December 16, 11:30 AM Pacific Time. We will host webinars to provide more information and answer your questions about both RFPs. 

Accelerating the Development of Innovative, Exceptionally Low-Cost Maternal and Child Nutrient Ingredients and Products:

• November 12, 7:00-8:00 AM Pacific Time – webinar link / submit a question

Accelerating Innovation in Vaginal Formulations in Support of Women’s Health :

• November 20, 6:00-7:00 AM Pacific Time – webinar link / submit a question

Like all Grand Challenges projects over 20-plus years, the newly announced RFPs will foster innovation to address urgent global priorities.  We invite you to read summaries of selected Grand Challenges grants, explore an interactive world map of projects across the Grand Challenges network. 

ORCA Catalytic Awards Program Round 2 Now Live. With support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA) announces the second round of the Catalytic Awards Program. This initiative aims to cultivate and nurture champions and communities of open research practitioners promoting the culture of open scholarship and collaboration at traditionally under-resourced, U.S.-based institutions. Each award offers up to $15,000 to help implement open science, civic science, open data, and other open-sharing practices promoting research transparency, reproducibility, community engagement, collaboration, and inclusive research environments. See round 1 supported projects here.

• Application Deadline: December 1st, 2025
• Award Amount: Grants up to $15,000
• Eligible Applicants: Scholars and staff members affiliated with non-R1 or traditionally under-resourced institutions in the U.S.
  

Feel free to reach out to eunice@orcaopen.org for further information. Start your application process here.

Russell Sage Foundation: Social, Political and Economic Inequality Research Grants. 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. Award amount: $200,000. Deadline to apply: March 11, 2026.

Learn more.

Russell Sage Foundation: Causal Research on the Criminal Justice System for Early-Career Scholars. 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. Award amount: $100,000. Deadline to apply: April 1, 2026. Learn more.

OPPORTUNITIES

Call for Experts. Workshop on Enhancing Scientific Integrity: Progress and Opportunities in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. We are now accepting nominations for a National Academies planning committee that will organize an upcoming workshop: Enhancing Scientific Integrity: Progress and Opportunities in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. This workshop will bring together researchers, journal editors, publishers, funders, and leaders of scientific associations to explore forward-looking strategies for strengthening transparency, accountability, and data integrity in the social and behavioral sciences.

Topics the workshop may address include:

• Constructive, scalable approaches to ensuring research transparency and data integrity
• Fair and effective methods for identifying and addressing errors or misconduct
• Policies that promote rigor and accountability while supporting broad participation in science
• Tools and governance models that strengthen trust in scientific findings

We invite nominations of individuals with expertise in the social and behavioral sciences, scientific publishing, research ethics, law or criminology, data infrastructure, policy, and related areas. Please submit nominations by November 7 at 11:59 PM ET. Submit nominations.

Call for nominations for the ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award. Nominations due January 1, 2026. More information here. 

CONFERENCES

The European Society of Contraception and Reproductive Health is thrilled to announce that the 18th ESC Congress will take place in Belgrade, Serbia, May 6-9 2026. This event, “Breaking Barriers in Sexual and Reproductive Health,” is a cornerstone for advancing knowledge and collaboration in sexual and reproductive health. Join us in Belgrade, a vibrant and dynamic location, where experts, researchers, and professionals from around the world will come together to exchange insights, discuss innovations, and shape the future of reproductive health. Learn more and submit an abstract. 

The 2026 IPDLN Conference, organized by the International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN), will be held at Erasmus University Rotterdam, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on July 13–16, 2026. The 2026 IPDLN Conference will place particular emphasis on empirical studies using population and administrative datasets, the transformative potential of administrative data linkage, methodological innovations that advance the field of population data science, and ethical and legal implications. Sub-themes extend from previous conferences and include: cutting-edge approaches to data linkage across diverse administrative sources; governance, privacy, and public engagement in large-scale data infrastructures; advances in analytical methods for working with complex, high-volume linked data; and the translation of methodological and empirical insights into policy impact across sectors and disciplines.

With participants drawn from a wide range of jurisdictions and professional backgrounds, the conference offers a unique forum to exchange best practices, showcase innovative methods, and share cutting-edge research in the use of linked administrative and population data.

To view the full submission guidelines and complete list of themes, click here and then log in to Oxford Abstracts. Deadline for submissions: 14 December 2025.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The New Asylum Seekers: Subnational Dynamics of Migration Governance in the United States. The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is planning a special issue examining the ways in which contemporary asylum seekers to the US resemble and differ from other immigrants, past and present. This issue considers how rising asylum-seeking shapes subnational responses among diverse state and non-state actors; it compares the experiences of asylum-seeking newcomers with long-term unauthorized immigrants; it analyzes the relationships of these groups with the US-born population; and, in turn, it assesses their influence on broader US immigration policies. Prospective contributors’ first deadline is January 7, 2026. See details.