The 2017–18 academic year has come to a close, making it a great time to reflect back on what has been accomplished at CDE since September. “It’s an exciting time to be at CDE, with an exceptional interdisciplinary group of faculty, thoughtful and hardworking students and postdocs, and top-notch staff who support the Center’s various research and training activities,” said Marcy Carlson, CDE’s director.
During the academic year, affiliates successfully competed for federal funding, receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation for a range of topics on health, the demography of inequality, and fertility, families, and households. Faculty members have also secured non-government funding from agencies like the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics and the Spencer Foundation.
Faculty affiliates and graduate students have published extensively and their work has appeared in some of the top demography-related publications in the field. Several papers have received national media attention, including Michael Light’s “Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?” on NPR and Jason Fletcher’s collaborative research on the social genome of friends, which was covered by Time. In total, 26 faculty affiliates have been mentioned in over 65 articles appearing in state and national media outlets, such as the Wisconsin State Journal, Wisconsin Public Radio, New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Forbes, and The New Yorker.
Faculty affiliates, visiting scholars, and graduate students also shared their research at the PAA annual meeting, appearing on the conference program 90 times. Three graduate students were poster winners: Tiffany Neman(“Financial Well-being and Status: Does the Geographic Context Matter?”), Michael King (“The Great Equalizer Revisited: Educational Attainment and Spousal Characteristics”), and Amrita Kulka (“Rural Physician Shortages and Policy Intervention”).
CDE’s weekly Demography Seminar featured 26 speakers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, 22 of whom came from beyond the Madison campus. CDE also co-hosted several guest lectures and workshops, including the Hilldale Lecture by Peter Bearman (Columbia) in September, a visit by Mark Hugo Lopez of the Pew Research Center, and the La Follette School of Public Affairs Spring Symposium, “Emerging Policy and Ethical Implications from Neuroscience, Genetics, and the Microbiome.”