New Grants and Awards for CDE Affiliates

CDE affiliates had a productive fall semester—congratulations to Michael Light, Katherine Curtis, Marcy Carlson, Malia Jones, Marguerite Burns, and Jenna Nobles for their new grants and awards.

Michael Light (sociology; Chican@/Latin@ studies) received funding from the National Science Foundation for the new project, “Immigration, Legal Status, and Criminal Adjudication in State Courts.” Using the California Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) and the Texas Computerized Criminal History System (CCH), Light and researchers will work to uncover whether similar citizen and noncitizen arrestees caught engaging in the same criminal conduct receive different case outcomes. The research team will analyze CORI and CCH data at multiple key stages in case processing, such as the decision to charge, type of charging offense, and incarceration outcomes, including prison, jail, or no imprisonment.

Light has published extensively on citizenship, immigration, and crime. His paper, “Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?” co-authored with Ty Miller (Purdue), was Wiley Sociology’s most popular article of the year in 2018.

Malia Jones received a K01 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to support the project “Estimating Childhood Infectious Disease Outbreak Risk in the Context of Heterogeneous Vaccine Coverage.” Jones’ work aims to quantify the excess risk of measles and whooping cough outbreaks that stem from clusters of unvaccinated children. The project will also explore the attributes of vaccine-hesitant ideas through interviews and web-based surveys of parents who are reluctant or refuse to have their children vaccinated. The results of the project will inform how to prevent the formation of, or how to respond to, groups of parents who refuse vaccines.

NICHD funded an R13 grant for an upcoming conference, organized by Katherine Curtis (community and environmental sociology), Malia Jones (Applied Population Laboratory), and Marcy Carlson (sociology), on demographic responses to changes in the natural environment.

The conference, to be held in Madison October 24–25, 2019, will bring together scholars who conduct research at the intersection of environmental studies and demographic analysis to promote the exchange of conceptual frameworks, analytical strategies, data sources, and expertise. Research panels will focus on key aspects of environmental change, including drought, sea level rise, and catastrophic events, and will bring focused attention to comparisons across developing and developed contexts.

Marguerite Burns (population health sciences) was the recipient of one of four new awards from the Wisconsin Partnership Program, which supports collaborative, original research from interdisciplinary teams. The awards provide up to $600,000 to each project over a 3-year period.

Burns and co-principal investigator Ryan Westergaard (medicine) will lead the project, “Leaving Prison and Connecting with Medical Care: Medicaid Expansion, Treatment Access and Outcomes for Opioid Use Disorder and Hepatitis C Infection.” The project will explore the effects of prison-based Medicaid enrollment—which resulted from the 2014 expansion of Medicaid eligibility—on treatment access, use, and outcomes for opioid use disorder and hepatitis C infections for adults released from state prisons.

The American Journal of Public Health has given a best paper award to CDE affiliate Jenna Nobles (sociology), David Kindig (population health sciences, emeritus), and graduate student Moheb Zidan (economics). The paper, “Meeting the Institute of Medicine’s 2030 US Life Expectancy Target,” focuses on the growing gap in life expectancy between the U.S. and various European countries. The paper highlights many factors implicated in the plateauing of U.S. life expectancy, including birth complications, accidents, injuries, homicide, and various health behaviors and outcomes.