Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data again available to new users. After funding for USAID and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) was eliminated in February 2025, new researchers could no longer apply online for access to DHS data, and existing DHS users could not gain access to additional countries’ data. This restriction affected would-be users of both the original DHS public use files and the integrated version of DHS data through IPUMS DHS. Fortunately, The DHS Program recently announced, “We are now open for new registrations.” Read the related blog post from IPUMS.

Join us this week for our Brownbag Seminar on Wednesday, September 24th at 12pm. Erin Hartman, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, will present, “Inference with Weights: Residualization Produces Short, Valid Intervals for Varying Estimands and Varying Resampling Processes.” 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.

Save the date: The 2025 NIH BSSR Festival will be held November 19-20, 2025. This event is organized by the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) and the NIH BSSR Coordinating Committee. The festival highlights research from across NIH’s Institutes and Centers, offering a broad view of the latest NIH-funded BSSR projects and their impact on biomedical research. This year’s festival is a celebration of OBSSR’s 30th anniversary, with special sessions highlighting the history and future of BSSR at NIH. Read more.

Reminder: Since 2005, NIH has posted all grant and cooperative agreement notices of funding opportunities (NOFOs) in both Grants.gov, a federal-wide portal for discretionary funding opportunities, and the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts (NIH Guide).  Beginning in fiscal year 2026, NIH will no longer post NOFOs in the NIH Guide. Grants.gov will serve as NIH’s single official source for grant and cooperative agreement funding opportunities. The NIH Guide will continue to be used for policy and informational notices.  Learn more about the change at NOT-OD-25-143 and NIH Grants & Funding website. 

Featured affiliate research of the week: Everyday Futures: Language as Survival for Indigenous Youth in Diaspora. 2025. Stephanie L. Canizales and Brendan H. O’Connor. California: Stanford University Press. 

See further announcements and opportunities below.

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EVENTS

September 22 | 2-3:30pm | UC Berkeley Sociology Colloquium Series | Davon Norris, Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) and Faculty Associate at the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics at the University of Michigan. The talk is entitled, “Legitimation by (Mis)identification: Credit, Discrimination, and The Racial Epistemology of Algorithmic Expansion.” Location: 820 Social Sciences Building (Matrix). The event will be in-person only. The event is co-sponsored with Social Science Matrix, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI) Tech Cluster, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), and UC Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Training Program (CRELS). See the full event details here. 

September 23 | 12:30pm | UC Berkeley Health Policy Colloquium Series | with Marianne Page, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis. “Sources of Generational Persistence in the Effects of Early-Life Health Interventions” 2121 Berkeley Way West, Room 1104. Event details. 

September 24 | 12-1:05pm |  UC Berkeley Demography Seminar Series | Erin Hartman, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, will present, “Inference with Weights: Residualization Produces Short, Valid Intervals for Varying Estimands and Varying Resampling Processes.” Social Sciences, Room 310 and zoom. See the full event details here. Zoom ID: 985 2901 0198 Passcode DEMOG_BB

September 25 | 12-1:10pm | UC Berkeley Center for African Studies | Africa Matters. Work-in-Progress Series.  470 Stephens Hall.

Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) Fellows Panel:

• Eric Ochieng: Testing Amenable Low-Cost Interventions for Enhancing the Childcare Quality of Home-Based Childcare Centers in LMIC Settings: Evidence from Western Kenya.
• Peninah Yvonne Nyamori: Strengthening Early Learning Through Caregiver Training in Informal Day-Care Settings: a Cluster-RCT in Mombasa.
• Abebe Ayana: Re-establishing livelihoods of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and improving child Education: Evidence from an RCT from Ethiopia
• Samwel Nassary: Does Public Goods Delivery Influence Citizen Legibility? A Randomized Controlled Trial Tackling Water Scarcity.

OPPORTUNITIES

One Epidemic, Many Estimates (1EME) Project. London School of Economics (LSE) is convening a “many analyst” project in which teams will analyse data from the 1918-20 influenza pandemic using excess mortality methods of their choice (solo researchers also welcome). This will be followed by a workshop at the LSE on 21-22 May 21-22 2026. The analyses submitted and the discussions at the workshop will be written up into a manuscript with all analysts eligible for authorship. More details can be found here. Enrolment in the “many analysts” project will be open for the next few months, with final submissions due by 15 March 2026. Contact Hampton Gaddy (h.g.gaddy@lse.ac.uk) with any questions.

Training Course: Topics in Digital and Computational Demography
Rostock, Germany & Online, 3-7 November 2025. Application deadline: 28 September 2025 

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is offering a new edition of its open course on Topics in Digital and Computational Demography (3-7 November 2025) and encourages qualified candidates to apply.

The course will be offered in a hybrid format: in-person for students in the IMPRS-PHDS network who are already in Rostock; online (via Zoom) for everyone else.

• Coordinator: Risto Conte Keivabu
• Instructors: Boris Barron, Irena Chen, Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Risto Conte Keivabu, Jordan Klein, Ebru Sanlitürk, Benjamin-Samuel Schlueter, Tom Theile, Emilio Zagheni

This year, topics include:

• Introduction to Digital and Computational Demography; Approaches for combining representative data and non-probabilistic samples; Identifying sources of bias in digital trace data and adjusting for them. In the practice session, we will scrape websites with R and then access web-APIs from OpenAI with R.
• Digital trace data for migration research: Introduction to migration theories and ethics of digital data use; Fundamentals of data collection and analysis of digital trace data; Advantages and critical challenges of using different types of digital trace data, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Trends, Wikipedia, and Bibliometric data.
• Introduction to geospatial and environmental data; Working with geospatial data in R; Advantages and pitfalls of available open data on the environment; Working with open geospatial and environmental data; Handling of environmental data for demographic research; Introducing a geospatial component to migration/mobility data.
• Simulations in the social sciences; Formulating assumptions into empirical tests; Loss functions for performance evaluation; Ordinary differential equations in modeling contexts; Empirical vs mechanistic models; Verifying and calibrating models.
• Bayesian approaches with applications to demography, Introduction to Bayes (comparison to frequentist statistics) including Bayes rule; implementation of MCMC algorithms (HMC, Gibbs), interpretation of results (credible intervals, posterior distributions) and model diagnostics; mortality models; methods for estimation issues in demography (missing data, small area estimation, multiple data sources).

How to apply:

For more information and application instructions, please see our detailed course description. To apply, complete this form.

The deadline for applications is 28 September 2025. Applicants will be informed of their admission by 8 October 2025. Contact: If you have any questions, reach out to phds@demogr.mpg.de.

WORKSHOPS 

The Institute for Social Research (ISR) invites applications for the Genomics for Social Scientists – Epigenetics workshop, which will be held virtually, January 20-23, 2026. Learn more and apply by October 31, 2025.