Dear Population Science Community,
Welcome back to UC Berkeley and to the Berkeley Population Center! We hope this summer has been rejuvenating.
We are thrilled to first announce and welcome Demography’s new faculty member, Jenna Nobles! Jenna brings new strengths to the department in the demography of early-life, family, migration, mortality, and inequality as well as leadership experience in population centers and NIH-supported training programs. Her research has been funded by the NIH, NSF, J-PAL, and William T. Grant Foundation. Please be sure to say hello and welcome Jenna. She is in 398 Social Sciences. We are happy and extremely lucky to have you, Jenna!
Please join us on Wednesday, September 4th, 12pm, for a Welcome Back Lunch, held during our regularly scheduled brown bag seminar slot and in our Seminar Room, 310 Social Sciences. Let’s collectively welcome and meet new and veteran faculty, affiliates, staff, and students for the academic year 2024-2025. Food and drink will be provided.
We are happy to announce that the Berkeley Population Center has received a five-year funding renewal from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We are grateful for the continued support that allows us to continue our population research initiatives for another five years.
Congratulations to Demography’s Magali Barbieri, along with her co-Investigator Alison Gemmill of Johns Hopkins University and Berkeley Demography alum, for their large infrastructure grant award under the National Science Foundation’s Human Networks and Data Science Infrastructure Program! This three-year grant project, “The United States Fertility Database: Understanding and Monitoring Changes in Local Fertility Patterns,” will permit the investigators to create a new, freely-accessible database aimed at helping researchers and policy makers study changes in reproductive behavior and how local economic and social factors influence the level of fertility. Although the level of fertility in the United States has fallen regularly since the end of the 2000s, reaching a low of 1.6 children per woman in 2023, the reasons behind this trend are still poorly understood due to a lack of detailed data. This project aims to fill this gap by creating a database of fertility indicators for each state and the District of Columbia for every year since 1959, and for each county since 1982. Excellent work!
Request for Information. NICHD is updating its current (2020-2024) strategic plan. The updated plan for 2025-2029 will help guide the research NICHD will support over the next five years. The purpose of this RFI is to solicit feedback on the scientific goals and opportunities under consideration for the refreshed NICHD strategic plan. Please see below the link for details. Comments are due September 27. PAA and APC will submit comments on behalf of both organizations, but interested individuals are encouraged to submit their own as well.
NOT-HD-24-028: Request for Information (RFI): NICHD Strategic Plan 2025. If you have any feedback on the 2025 Strategic Plan, please email NICHDStrategicPlan@nih.gov.
See further announcements and opportunities below.
EVENTS
September 11 | 12:10-1pm | UC Berkeley Demography Colloquium | Chadi Saad-Roy, a Miller Research Fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley. Chadi will present his research on “Using Simple Models to Untangle Infectious Disease Dynamics Across Scales: From Immuno-epidemiology to Behavioral-epidemiological Dynamics.” This is an in-person talk, 310 Social Sciences Building. The presentation will also be available via Zoom. Event details are here. Visit our Brown Bag event page for both past and upcoming talks here.
WORKSHOPS, CONFERENCES
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) will host the Second Rostock Open Science Workshop in Rostock, Germany, March 17–18, 2025. Open science aims to make research results and materials freely accessible to everyone, with the goal of increasing knowledge circulation, increasing transparency, and providing the means to reproduce and generalize published findings. Apply here. Deadline for applications is September 15th 2024.
Please see attached the Research Centers Collaborative Network (RCCN) Workshop on Climate Change and Aging on November 12 in Seattle. Travel awards are available for early career investigators and will participate in a special career development session at the meeting on November 13. Please apply for this opportunity by Thursday, September 5.
FUNDING
The National Institutes of Health is offering up to $3 million in cash prizes to accelerate development of non-invasive technologies to improve diagnosis of endometriosis—a common and often debilitating gynecological disease. The RADx® Tech ACT ENDO Challenge seeks to shorten the time to diagnosis, eliminate the invasiveness of current techniques, and/or improve accessibility, safety, convenience and costs of diagnosis. NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) are co-leading the challenge. Read the full Item of Interest at https://go.nih.gov/kwsF3gC.
Advancing Healthcare for Older Adults from Populations that Experience Health Disparities (R01 – Clinical Trial Optional)
NIA POC: Priscilla Novack (priscilla.novak@nih.gov)
Deadline: Standard due dates through October 5, 2027.
Short Courses Promoting Cross-National Analyses Using Data from the International Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) (R25 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
NIA POC: Minki Chatterji (minki.chatterji@nih.gov)
Deadline: October 10, 2024.
RCCN Pilot Award. The RCCN seeks to fund at least two collaborative pilot, planning or meeting grants supporting interdisciplinary research in cross cutting theme areas per grant cycle. Each award will provide up to $65,000 in direct costs. The proposals must include investigators affiliated with at least two different NIA Centers Programs (AITCs, Shock, Roybal, Older American Independence Centers (Pepper), Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research, Centers for Demography and Economics of Aging, and Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers). Please note the RCCN Pilot Award RFA has recently been revised to allow for a wider variety of topics, including those not previously covered by an RCCN Workshop. We have also added a new letter of intent stage for applicants. Review the new RFA here. Please reach out to contact@rccn-aging.org with any questions. The deadline to apply for this cycle is Tuesday, October 1, 2024. Instructions for how to submit an LOI are available here.
OPPORTUNITIES
Scholarships Available: Gerontological Society Association Workshop on Amazing New Cohort Data for Research on Aging, Cognition, and Health. Looking for cohort data collected from large, diverse, nationally-representative samples of Americans followed from high school through mid/late life that are ideal for studying the social and biological pathways through which education and other early life factors shape later life cognition and health? The Education Studies for Healthy Aging (EdSHARe) project has you covered … and they are offering a workshop about the data during the annual Gerontological Society of America (GSA) meetings in November … and they are offering up to 20 scholarships to attend the workshop for free.
- The GSA EdSHARe workshop will be held on Thursday, 11/14 from 8am to noon
- Attached are two fliers … one about EdSHARe data and one about the workshop. To apply for a scholarship to attend the workshop for free, please fill out this short application form.
- Questions about EdSHARe, the GSA workshop, or this scholarship? Please email info@edshareproject.org.