Fall 2023 at CSSS, Letter from the Director
With the beginning of a new academic year 2023-2024, and our week-long Math Camp coming to an end, we are excited to share the latest happenings and new faces and new roles within CSSS!
We have been busy making plans to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our founding this coming May. In addition to highlighting special themes during the seminar series this year, we will hold a celebratory event on campus May 16-17, 2024 that will bring alums, friends, and campus partners together with workshops, poster sessions, scientific sessions, and ample opportunities for socializing. Please mark your calendars!
We are proud to announce that CSSS core faculty Tyler McCormick has been promoted to Full Professor of Statistics and Sociology. A new CSSS core faculty and Assistant Professor of Sociology, Sasha Johfre, has joined the UW in Summer 2023. In Spring 2023, CSSS said goodbye to retiring long-term CSSS Administrator Sumi Hayashi. Betsy Cornish joined as the Center Administrator later in Spring, just in time to oversee CSSS’s transition to the University’s new financial system. Throughout the year, we also worked with PhD students from the Department of Communication, Aparna Gosh and Polly Straub-Cook, who helped revitalize the CSSS web page. Finally, the administrative team was complete this Summer with Taylor Holliday joining as Program Coordinator. A 2018 UW graduate, Holliday has already contributed by streamlining various processes in the office.
We are pleased to announce that Christopher Adolph, a Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Professor of Statistics, will serve as the new Associate Director of the Center. Adolph has been an integral part of CSSS as one of the core faculty since 2004. From 2016 to 2023, Adolph directed the CSSS Statistical Consulting service, steering it successfully through the pandemic. Adolph’s courses on Data Visualization and Maximum Likelihood for Social Scientists have consistently been among the most popular courses in CSSS. We are especially excited about his leadership for the CSSS graduate program since he has been a catalyst for training the next generation of quantitative Social Science researchers.
We have also restructured the administrative oversight of the CSSS PhD tracks. After serving several impactful years as CSSS Graduate Chair, Adrian Dobra has stepped back from CSSS to focus on his data science work. Going forward, Associate Director Adolph will oversee the PhD tracks, and our Program Coordinator Taylor Holliday will manage the day-to-day operations.
With Adolph assuming the Associate Director role, Carlos Cinelli, an Assistant Professor of Statistics and an affiliate faculty of the CSSS, has been named as the new Director of the CSSS Statistical Consulting program. Cinelli joined the University of Washington in 2021 and is known for his research on developing new statistical methodology for transparent and robust causal claims in the empirical sciences. He has a PhD in Statistics from UCLA and an MS in Economics from the University of Brasilia. Cinelli is already familiar to CSSS graduate students as the instructor of Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences. We are excited about Cinelli’s continued involvement, and confident that our Consulting service will thrive under his leadership.
Finally, we are happy to announce that our seminar committee will once again be skillfully led by Tyler McCormick who will be joined by Asli Cansunar (Assistant Professor of Political Science), Chun Wang (Associate Professor of Education), and Nathalie Williams (Associate Professor of Sociology and International Studies) as the CSSS seminar committee. The seminar series has always been at the heart of our intellectual community and in this 25th year the seminars will feature special visits by alums and long-time friends of CSSS. The opening seminar talk on October 4th will be delivered by Adrian Raftery, the Boeing International Professor of Statistics and Sociology, and the Founding Director of CSSS. Our three incoming Blalock Fellows will also be introduced at that seminar. Please mark Wednesdays from 12:30-1:30 in your calendars.
All of us in CSSS are eager to kick off a new academic year at UW and look forward to all the exciting events to come!
Elena Erosheva
CSSS Director
