Abstract
The Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) at the University of Washington
proposes a training program to create a new generation of population scientists and
demographers equipped with skills to conduct data intensive research with advanced
computational and statistical methods. Population science provides a crucial interdisciplinary
framework for understanding the social, economic, political, and demographic dynamics affecting
patterns of disease, mortality, fertility, and migration, but to extract signal from noise in the
complex interplay of these processes the next generation requires a training in state-of-the-art
methods. The program will prepare trainees to be leaders in problems involving a wide range of
complex data, including data arising from multiple sources, data not intended for research (e.g.
administrative data), dynamic or spatial data, network data, and “big data’’ sources. At the core
of this program is a collaboration between CSDE, the eScience Institute (UW’s data science
center), and the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS). These three institutes
combine extensive expertise in demographic methods, data science, computer science and
statistical methods and have a long, successful record of collaboration on research and training
activities, including a BD2K track in Big Data for Demographic Research. Through this
collaboration, trainees will take a series of coursework in the following areas: advanced statistical
methods and machine learning, coding, databases, data visualization/communication, and data
ethics. Trainees will also take part in team-mentoring processes, where they develop an
apprenticeship relationship with a primary mentor but also learn directly from other faculty and
trainees through collaborative projects and seminars. Mentors will come from all three centers,
along with a variety of additional departments, selected to provide the most relevant expertise,
including multiple faculty from the highly-ranked departments of Biostatistics, Statistics and
Computer Science & Engineering. Further, trainees will get hands-on experience through
rotations with on-campus and local partners. Each trainee will do a rotation in eScience’s
Reproducibility and Open Science Special Interest Group (SIG), which develops resources that
facilitate reproducible research. The training program will ensure trainees obtain the requisite
theoretical and applied experience to take on whatever challenges and complexities the data
revolution next provides. CSDE requests support for 5 pre-doctoral trainees per year, with total
direct costs of $1,744,650.00, over 5 years.