Dr. Briana Mezuk

Briana Mezuk

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Dr. Mezuk is the Director of the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health and is an Associate Chair in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She is a psychiatric epidemiologist whose research focuses on understanding the intersections of mental and physical health. Much of her work has examined the consequences of depression for medical morbidity and functioning in mid- and late-life, with particular attention to metabolic diseases such as diabetes and frailty. She is also the Director of the Michigan Integrative Well-Being and Inequalities (MIWI) Training Program, a NIH-funded methods training program that supports innovative, interdisciplinary research on the interrelationships between mental and physical health as they relate to health disparities. She is using data science tools to analyze textual data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, with the goal of better understanding how major life transitions relate to suicide risk over the lifespan. She is committed to translating research into practice, and she writes a blog for Psychology Today called “Ask an Epidemiologist.”

Matthew VanEseltine

Matthew VanEseltine

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Dr. VanEseltine is a sociologist and data scientist working with large-scale administrative data for causal and policy analysis. His interests include studying the effects of scientific infrastructure, training, and initiatives, as well as the development of open, sustainable, and replicable systems for data construction, curation, and dissemination. As part of the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), he contributes to record linkage and data improvements in the research community releases of UMETRICS, a data system built from integrated records on federal award funding and spending from dozens of American universities. Dr. VanEseltine’s recent work includes studying the impacts of COVID-19 on academic research activity.

Inbal (Billie) Nahum-Shani

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Inbal (Billie) Nahum-Shani is a Research Associate Professor in the Institute for Social Research, and a founding member of the Data-science for Dynamic Decision-making lab (d3lab) at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on conceptual and methodological issues pertaining to the construction of effective Adaptive Interventions — a treatment design in which ongoing information from the person is used to individualize the type/dose/modality of support (or treatment); and Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAIs) — a special form of adaptive interventions in which mobile devices are used to provide support in a timely and ecological manner.

Yajuan Si

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My research lies in cutting-edge methodology development in streams of Bayesian statistics, complex survey inference, missing data imputation, causal inference, and data confidentiality protection. I have extensive collaboration experiences with health services researchers and epidemiologists to improve healthcare and public health practice, and have been providing statistical support to solve sampling and analysis issues on health and social science surveys.

Michael Traugott

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Michael Traugott, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Research Professor Emeritus, Center for Political Studies and Adjunct Research Professor, Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research.

Professor Traugott studies the mass media and their impact on American politics. This includes research on the use of the media by candidates in their campaigns and its impact on voters, as well as the ways that campaigns are covered and the impact of this coverage on candidates. He has a particular interest in the use of surveys and polls and the way news organizations employ them to cover campaigns and elections.

Matthew Shapiro

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Prof. Shapiro is the Lawrence R. Klein Collegiate Professor of Economics, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and Research Professor, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Prof. Shapiro’s general area of research is macroeconomics. He has studied investment and capital utilization, business-cycle fluctuations, consumption and saving, financial markets, monetary policy, fiscal policy, and time-series econometrics. Among his current research interests are consumption, saving, retirement, and portfolio choices of households, the effects of tax policy on investment, using surveys in macroeconomics, and improving the quality of national economic statistics.

Colter Mitchell

Colter Mitchell

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Dr. Mitchell’s research focuses on the causes and consequences of family formation behavior. He examines how social context such as neighborhood resources and values influence family processes and how those processes interplay with an individual’s genetic and epigenetic makeup to influence behavior, wellbeing, and health. His research also includes the development of new methods for integrating the collection and analysis of biological and social data.

Jowei Chen

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Jowei Chen, PhD, is Associate Professor of Political Science in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prof. Chen holds a secondary appointment in the Center for Political Studies in the Institute for Social Research.

Prof. Chen’s research focuses on political geography and political institutions in the United States. His work on legislative districts examines how the geography of Democrat and Republican voters, as well as the political manipulation of district boundaries, affects voters’ political representation in legislatures. This work uses individual-level and precinct-level data about elections, combined with computer simulations of the district-drawing process. Other research projects analyze the political composition of the federal workforce by analyzing the campaign contributions and partisanship of bureaucratic employees, linking employee records with voter registration records and campaign finance data.

 

 

Brian Min

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Brian Min, PhD, is Associate Professor of Political Science in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prof. Min holds secondary appointments as Research Associate Professor in the Center for Political Studies and the Institute for Social Research.

Prof. Min studies the political economy of development with an emphasis on distributive politics, public goods provision, and energy politics. His research uses high-resolution satellite imagery to study the distribution of electricity across and within the developing world. He has collaborated closely with the World Bank using satellite technologies and statistical algorithms to monitor electricity access in India and Africa, including the creation of a web platform to visualize twenty years of change in light output for every village in India (http://nightlights.io).

 

min-nightlights

Jason Owen-Smith

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Professor Owen-Smith conducts research on the collective dynamics of large scale networks and their implications for scientific and technological innovation and surgical care. He is the executive director of the Institution for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS, http://iris.isr.umich.edu).  IRIS is a national consortium of research universities who share data and support infrastructure designed to support research to understand, explain, and eventually improve the public value of academic research and research training.

One year snapshot of the collaboration network of a single large research university campus. Nodes are individuals employed on sponsored project grants, ties represent copayment on the same grant account in the same year. Ties are valued to reflect the number of grants in common. Node size is proportional to a simple measure of betweenness centrality and node color represents the results of a simple (walktrip) community finding algorithm. The image was created in Gephi.

One year snapshot of the collaboration network of a single large research university campus. Nodes are individuals employed on sponsored project grants, ties represent copayment on the same grant account in the same year. Ties are valued to reflect the number of grants in common. Node size is proportional to a simple measure of betweenness centrality and node color represents the results of a simple (walktrip) community finding algorithm. The image was created in Gephi.