Fall 2025 at CSSS, Letter from the Director

I am reaching out with a few updates and announcements for the academic year 2025-26. Amid ongoing changes happening across the UW and in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), CSSS is here as a support and resource to our community of graduate students and faculty. 

Start the year by reviewing this year’s CSSS course list — a useful resource for academic planning and student advising. We have two new CSSS listings that are contributions from the College of Education: CS&SS 591 Item Response Theory I, and CS&SS 595, Monte Carlo Simulations. Questions about course offerings are always welcome and can be sent to csss@uw.edu. 

In early summer, CSSS conducted a course interest survey. Thank you to all graduate students who responded! Results showed a steady interest in all CSSS course offerings with some additional accumulated interest for courses that have not been offered in a while such as CS&SS 567 Statistical Analysis of Social Networks. This feedback helps guide planning for future course offerings.  

Beginning Winter 2026, course prefixes will no longer use the ampersand (&). This small change prevents tech issues in UW systems and keeps things consistent with how people already say ‘Cee Triple-Ess.’ 

There are a few changes in CSSS leadership:  

After five years of leading the Center’s seminars, CSSS core faculty Tyler McCormick (Statistics and Sociology) is stepping away from the seminar committee. We are grateful to Tyler for steering CSSS seminars through both the COVID-19 pandemic and the Zoom revolution.  

Starting this year, Mako Hill (Communication) will be leading the seminar committee, joined by Conor Mayo-Wilson (Philosophy) and Aleksandr (Sasha) Aravkin (Applied Mathematics/Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation). The Center’s seminars will continue to take place on Wednesdays from 12:30-1:20 in Savery Hall (SAV) room 409 and on Zoom. Check out our webpage for the exciting lineup of talks this fall! 

I am also thrilled to announce that Yen-Chi Chen (Statistics) joins us this fall as the new director of CSSS Consulting. A leading expert in nonparametric statistics, causal inference, missing data, and mixture modeling, Yen-Chi brings a wealth of experience from collaborative projects in fields ranging from astronomy to medicine and social sciences. 

CSSS Executive Committee welcomes new members: Patrick Greiner (Sociology), Mako Hill (Communication), Melissa Martinson (Social Work), and Liz Sanders (Education). I look forward to working with the Executive Committee as the College of Arts and Sciences goes through major staff reorganization this year.  

We also welcome our new graduate student representative Yijie Wang, a fourth-year PhD student in Education. For her dissertation, Yijie is studying quality in early childhood education. Yijie is looking forward to re-establishing student-only conference practice talks in CSSS — students should be on the lookout for an announcement later in the fall. 

Finally, I am excited to announce that CSSS welcomed 21 new faculty affiliates from 12 different departments across the University of Washington, with 14 affiliates joining us from units outside of the CAS Social Science Division. See the full list of new affiliates with photos in this article. We are excited for this new energy and urge our new affiliates to stay connected!  

Elena Erosheva
CSSS Director