Meeting Schedule
The STAB research group meets weekly at the Hans Rosling Center for Population Health and on Zoom. We use this time to update each other regarding our research progress, as well as invite presenters who work in research areas including spatial demography, survey statistics and methodology, and Bayesian modeling and computation.
Meeting times vary each academic quarter based on members' availability. In the Winter 2026 quarter, meetings are held on Tuesdays 12pm-1pm PST.
Winter Quarter, 2026
| Date | Presenter | Affiliation | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1/13 | Jon Wakefield | UW, Departments of Statistics & Biostatistics | Goals for 2026 |
| 1/20 | David Coomes | UW, Department of Epidemiology | The role of migration in rural-urban population-level mortality disparities in the US |
| 1/27 | Jonas Schöley | Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research | Confronting the possibility of catastrophe: Identification, characterization, and simulation of mortality shocks via Hidden Markov Lee-Carter models |
| 2/3 | Katie Paulson | UW, Department of Biostatistics | Multiple topics related to national and small area estimation of child mortality rates |
| 2/10 | David Coomes | UW, Department of Epidemiology | The association of wildfire air pollution and emergency room department visits 2018-2023 |
| 2/24 | Sasha Aravkin | UW, Department of Applied Mathematics | Fusing parametric and nonparametric estimation to obtain mortality results using heterogeneous data |
| 3/3 | Emanuele Giorgi | University of Birmingham | |
| 3/10 | Qianyu Dong | UC Santa Cruz | |
| 3/17 | Ameer Dharamshi | UW, Department of Biostatistics | |
| 3/24 | Silvia De Nicolò | University of Bologna |
Autumn Quarter, 2025
| Date | Presenter | Affiliation | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9/30 | Jon Wakefield | UW, Departments of Statistics & Biostatistics | The two cultures for prevalence mapping: small area estimation and spatial statistics |
| 10/7 | Richard Li | UC Santa Cruz | SAE Software |
| 10/14 | Jon Wakefield | UW, Departments of Statistics & Biostatistics | Automatic Variance Adjustment for Fay-Herriot Modeling |
| 10/21 | Abhi Datta | JHU, Department of Biostatistics | Machine learning for geospatial data with explicit modeling of spatial correlations |
| 11/4 | David Haziza | University of Ottawa, Department of Mathematics and Statistics | A Debiased Machine Learning Single-Imputation Framework for Item Nonresponse in Surveys |
| 11/25 | Laina Mercer | Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center | Polio mapping in low- and middle-income countries |
| 12/2 | Victoria Knutson | UW, Department of Biostatistics | Death distribution methods |
| 12/9 | Alana McGovern | UW, Department of Statistics | Variance smoothing in Fay Herriot models for small area means |
Spring Quarter, 2025
| Date | Presenter | Affiliation | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4/1 | Alex Ziyu Jiang | UW, Department of Statistics | BARTSIMP: flexible spatial covariate modeling and prediction using Bayesian additive regression trees |
| 4/8 | Haoyi Chen | UN, Statistics Division | Geospatial SAE |
| 4/22 | Nathanial Henry | Henry Spatial Analysis | Model-based geostatistics (MBG) package |
| 4/29 | Gauri Datta | University of Georgia | Application of credible regions for ranks of subpopulations |
| 5/6 | Carolina Franco | NORC at University of Chicago | |
| 5/20 | Peter Hoff | Duke University | FAB intervals |
| 5/27 | Paul Smith and Nikos Tzavidis | University of Southampton | Alternatives to evaluating small area estimates with direct estimates |
Winter Quarter, 2025
| Date | Presenter | Affiliation | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1/21 | Peter Diggle | Lancaster University | Spatio-temporal point processes |
| 2/4 | David Newhouse | World Bank | Poverty mapping |
| 2/11 | Herb Susmann & Leontine Alkema | NYU & UMass Amherst | Modeing shocks to demographic and health indicators |
| 2/25 | Jessica Godwin | UW, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology | Excess Mortality in Puerto Rico following Hurricane María |
| 3/4 | Ameer Dharamshi | UW, Department of Biostatistics | Exact variance estimation for model-assisted survey estimators using U- and V-statistics |
Fall Quarter, 2024
| Date | Presenter | Affiliation | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10/1 | Geir-Arne Fuglstad | Norwegian University of Science and Technology | Addressing Positional Anonymisation in Geostatistical Analyses of DHS Data |
| 10/8 | Ezra Gayawan | Federal University of Technology | An assessment of the impact of women’s empowerment on childhood vaccination coverage in Nigeria: a spatio-temporal analysis |
| 10/29 | Brian Njuguna | CEMA at University of Nairobi | SAE for soil-transmitted helminthiases |
| 11/5 | Katie Paulson | UW, Department of Biostatistics | Review of penalized complexity priors and scaling for IGMRFs |
| 11/12 | Richard Li | UC Santa Cruz | Methods for SAE model comparison |
| 11/26 | Janet van Niekerk | King Abdullah University of Science and Technology | Computation in the INLA package |
Spring Quarter, 2024
| Date | Presenter | Affiliation | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3/26 | Jim Thorson | NOAA Fisheries | Dynamic structural equation models: expressive specification for multivariate time-series and spatio-temporal models |
| 4/2 | Laura Dwyer-Lindgren | UW, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation | US Health Disparities Project |
| 4/9 | Mark Wheldon | United Nations | World Population Prospects: A Quick Tour of Probabilistic Methods |
| 4/30 | Yajuan Si | University of Michigan | On the Use of Auxiliary Variables in Multilevel Regression and Poststratification |
| 5/7 | Yunhan Wu | UW, Department of Biostatistics | Empowering LMIC Health Decision-Making: A Shiny App for Streamlined Prevalence Mapping with SurveyPrev |
| 5/21 | Spencer Pease | UW, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation | An introduction to the methodology used to estimate population, based off of the original popReconstuct model developed by Mark Wheldon et al. |
| 5/28 | Edson Utazi | University of Southampton | Bayesian hierarchical modelling approaches for combining information from multiple data sources to produce annual estimates of national immunization coverage |
| 6/4 | Cory Arrouzet | UW, Department of Epidemiology | Investigating the associations of Quilombola land control on arboviral diseases in Brazil using spatial regression and mathematical modeling |
Winter Quarter, 2024
| Date | Presenter | Affiliation | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1/16 | David Coomes | UW, Department of Epidemiology | Rural mortality and migration in the US |
| 1/30 | Peter Macharia | Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp | |
| 2/13 | Andreea L. Erciulescu | Westat | An overview of small area estimation with recent projects examples |
| 3/5 | Thomas Lumley | University of Auckland | survey R package |