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title Past and Future Speakers

Next Speaker

  • 4/2/2026 Open house. Virtual only.

Upcoming Speakers

  • 4/10/2026 Katherine R. McLaughlin, Associate Professor, Director – Survey Research Center, Department of Statistics, Oregon State University. In person. Modeling The Visibility Distribution for Respondent-Driven Sampling with Application to Population Size Estimation
      Click for details Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a network sampling method commonly used to access hidden populations, such as those at high risk for HIV/AIDS and related diseases, in situations where sampling frames do not exist and conventional sampling techniques are not possible. In RDS, participants recruit their peers into the study, which has proven effective as an enrollment strategy but requires careful statistical analysis when making inference about the population. Data from RDS surveys inform key policy and resource allocation decisions, and in particular population size estimates are essential to understand counts of at-risk individuals to develop counseling and treatment programs and monitor health needs and epidemics. Successive sampling population size estimation (SS-PSE) is a commonly used method to estimate population size from RDS surveys, in which the decrease in social network size of participants over the study period is used to gauge the sample fraction. We first present the SS-PSE methodology and compare it with several other commonly used population size estimation methods. We then present a modification to the SS-PSE methodology that jointly models the effective social network size of each individual, which we term visibility, along with the population size in a Bayesian framework. This enhancement adds a measurement error model for visibility in place of self-reported network size and a model for the number of recruits an individual can enroll. This is useful as self-reported network sizes are subject to missingness, misreporting, bias, and extreme values. Inferred visibilities are a way to smooth the degree distribution and bring in outliers as well as a mechanism to deal with missing and invalid network sizes. We demonstrate the performance of visibility SS-PSE on three populations from Kosovo sampled in 2014 using RDS.

Past Talks

  • 12/05/2025 Zack W. Almquist, Associate Professor in Sociology, UW. Overview of RDS employed to estimate totals and percentages for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.

  • 11/21/2025 Joseph Wallerstein. Postdoc at Harvard. Network-Talk and the Management of Homelessness in America. [Zoom]

      Click for details Joseph (Joey) Wallerstein is a postdoctoral College Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. He received his PhD in Sociology from Harvard in May 2024. Broadly, his research focuses on organizations, urban inequality, and homelessness. He is especially interested in how ideas, norms, and strategies at community-based nonprofits in the United States impact the management of homelessness and, by extension, the well-being of people experiencing homelessness.

  • 11/14/2025 Yehong Deng, PhD Student in Sociology, UW. Yehong will discuss air quality impacts on people experiencing homelessness.

  • 11/7/2025 Michael Fraas, PhD, CCC-SLP, CBIS (Private Practice, Seattle). Focus will be on the incidence of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in the local unhoused/marginally housed community in the greater Seattle area.

  • 10/31/2025 Raheem Chaudhry, Assistant Professor, Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, UW. "From Marcy to Madison Square? The Effects of Growing Up in Public Housing on Early Adulthood Outcomes" Link to the Paper.

  • 10/24/2025 Pelle G Tracey, Assistant Professor, UW iSchool. "Coordinated Entry in Practice: an Ethnographic Investigation of Philadelphia’s Homeless Services System".

      Click for details Pelle G. Tracey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School. He is a multi-method scholar broadly interested in how automated technologies and recordkeeping work in practice, particularly when deployed in frontline government or rental housing contexts. His current research is an ethnographic investigation of homeless services coordinated entry systems.

  • 10/17/2025 Nathalie E. Williams, Mingze Li, Brandon Morande, Yuanxi Li, Hugo Aguas, Caroline Teague, Aryaa Rajouria, Justin Simpson, Man-Lin Chen, Ihsan Kahveci, Zack W. Almquist, Amy Hagopian, and Paul Hebert. University of Washington. "A Portrait of the Unhoused Population of Seattle, WA 2023." CSDE Policy Report. [In person]

  • 10/10/2025 Ruth Tretter, Assistant Professor, Montana State University. Will talk on vehicular living and health. [Zoom]

  • 10/3/2025 -- Welcome to the 2025-2026 School year, in person and Zoom.

  • 05/16/2025 Michael Enich, Internal Medicine Resident, UW -- Will speak on a mixed-methods analysis of linked Medicaid and HMIS claims. It examined the prevalence of the ICD-10 code for homelessness, Z59.0, and its concordance with known homeless service use. It also included physician interviews exploring their perspectives on prevalence patterns in using the code.

  • 04/25/2025 Brandon Morande, PhD Student, Sociology, UW to talk on his MA Thesis on governmental control of people experiencing homelessness

  • 03/14/2025 Laura Petry, Postdoc UC Berkeley and Colette Auerswald, Professor Community Health at UC Berkeley -- will speak on couch surfing and issues around youth homelessness.

  • 03/07/2025 iSchool Capstone Presentation led by June Yang, Research Scientist, eScience and CSDE, and Ihsan Kahveci, PhD Student, Sociology, UW

    • Special Time: 3/7 from 10-12PM
    • Special Location: iSchool. Allen Library 187. Grand Conference Room.
      Click for details As part of an iSchool Capstone project, a team of 10 undergrad students are working on the development of an open-source software for Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) data collection. This web app is designed to facilitate both the data collection and storage of network information, a core component of the RDS method, as well as survey information. The start goal is to use this one-stop open source software to conduct the Point-in-Time (PIT) count of the unhoused population in King County, WA. The app comes with HIPAA compliance design to allow better data integration with the Homeless Management Information System (HIMS). The effort is led by Dr. Almquist, Ihsan Kahveci, and June Yang.

  • 02/21/2025 Whitney Gent, Assistant Professor of Communications at UNL. Will speak on U.S. homelessness rhetoric.

  • 02/14/2025 Molly Richard, Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University’s Center for Innovation in Social Science -- Will speak on doubled-up population.

  • 02/07/2025 Ryan M Finnigan, Associate Research Director, Terner Center for Housing Innovation, University of California, Berkeley

  • 01/31/2024 Nathanael Lauster, Associate Professor of Sociology, UBC -- will talk about what we see up here via homeless counts, etc, and local experiences, as well as what we get from comparative homeless counts in Vancouver, BC.

      Click for details

      See Dr Lauster's blog post on comparing King County, WA with Vancouver, WA, point-in-time count here.

  • 01/24/2025 Jason M. Ward, Codirector, RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness - will speak on ongoing enumeration/survey project on unsheltered homelessness in 3 neighborhoods in LA.

  • 01/17/2024 Thomas Byrne, Associate Professor of Social Work, Boston University -- Will speak on new work coming out in JAMA Network Open that presents new evidence from 2020 Census Data about the aging of the homeless population and a recent paper that looks at the community-level relationship between eviction and homelessness. In Person

  • 01/10/2025 Devin Collins, PhD Student, in Sociology, UW -- collaborative paper with Selen on the Seattle SOE.

      Click for details Title: A Prolonged State of Emergency for Homelessness? The 2015 Proclamations in Seattle and the Exercise of Symbolic Power
      Authors: Selen Güler and Devin Collins (co-first authors)
      Abstract: In fast-growing urban centers, growing homelessness has emerged as a vexing issue confronting local leaders. While poverty governance scholars assert that state actors respond by embracing strategies of punitive containment, overt criminalization may be untenable in the socially progressive cities experiencing some of the highest rates of homelessness in the county. Through an in-depth archival analysis of the 2015 State of Emergency (SOE) on homelessness in Seattle and King County, this study centers a case in which policymakers neither “normalized” homelessness nor openly projected commitments to punishment. Instead, the SOE framed homelessness as a social and economic catastrophe brought about by rapid growth, housing unaffordability, and policy failure. Despite this framing, immediate post-emergency policies remained narrowly focused on punitive, short-term interventions targeting the physical and administrative visibility of homelessness rather than its structural drivers. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of the state, we interpret the SOE and subsequent policies as an exercise of symbolic power stemming from officials’ need to reconcile the fiscal and social contradictions that increasing homelessness presents. By interrogating the disjuncture between official discourse and policy, this study offers new insights on the operation of social control and crisis mitigation in contemporary neoliberal cities.
  • 11/22/2024 Arturo Baiocchi, Associate Professor at California State University, Sacramento -- Will speak on his experience running the PIT survey and work with government-sanctioned camp in Sacramento.
      Click for details Title: TBD
      Authors: Arturo Baiocchi
      Biography: Dr. Baiocchi is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work at Sacramento State and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Health Policy, Practice, and Research (CHPRR). His research focuses on vulnerable young adults, mental health, and homelessness. He also teaches course in social welfare policy, homelessness, and community-based research. In the past seven years, Dr. Baiocchi, along with colleagues, have drafted a series of academic publications and community reports on the prevalence and response to homelessness in Sacramento County and across the state (e.g., reports for the CA Dept of Social Services, CA Interagency Council on Homelessness, US Bureau of Justice, Sacramento Continuum of Care, CA Health Foundation). Notably, Dr. Baiocchi was the lead author of the 2022 report “State of Homelessness in Sacramento County,” which highlighted pronounced trends in growing numbers of individuals experiencing homelessness in Sacramento, ongoing racial disparities, as well as the disconnect and marginalization that many individuals living on the street feel toward policies to address homelessness. His research has been highlighted in the Sacramento Bee, the Los Angeles Times, the Chris=an Science Monitor, Kaiser Health News, Capital Public Radio, CalMatters, and other media. In October 2022, Dr. Baiocchi received the Homeless Justice Champion of the Year award from the Sacramento Housing Alliance.

  • 11/15/2024 Chris Herring, Assistant Professor, UCLA -- Will present a chapter from his forthcoming book "Carewashing criminalization" on the ways liberal cities legitimate ongoing criminalization and the politics of criminalizing poverty more generally.

  • 11/01/2024 Gregg Colburn, Associate Professor in Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments, UW -- will speak on his book "Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns"

      Click for details Gregg Colburn, an associate professor in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, will talk about his book Homelessness is a Housing Problem. The book helps us better understand the current homelessness crisis, how we got here as a nation, and how we can do better in the future.

      Using rich and detailed data, this groundbreaking book explains why homelessness has become a crisis in America and reveals the structural conditions that underlie it. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, "Homelessness Is a Housing Problem" explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.

      Click for details Title: The Effect of Community Organizing on Landlords’ Use of Eviction Filing: Evidence from U.S. Cities
      Authors: Andrew Messamore
      Abstract: Eviction filing rates have declined in many large cities in the United States. Existing scholarship on eviction, which focuses on discrete tenant-landlord relationships, has few explanations for this decline. I consider whether community organizing by nonprofit organizations shapes the social organization of communities and causes landlords to file fewer eviction filings. In cities where tenant and anti-poverty organizing has become common, community-oriented nonprofit organizations advocate for disadvantaged communities and help residents avoid poverty. Community organizing has rarely been studied as a predictor of housing security among low-income tenants, despite studies of how community organizing shapes the use of property in wealthy neighborhoods. I estimate the causal effect of community organizations on eviction filing rates between 2000 and 2016 using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofits and eviction. Evidence from year-to-year models in 75 large cities spanning sixteen years estimate that an addition of ten community nonprofits in a city of 100,000 residents is associated with a ten percent reduction in eviction filing. This effect is comparable to the effect of community organizations on murder and is roughly a third of the association between eviction and concentrated disadvantage.
  • 10/04/2024 Brandon Morande, PhD Student in Sociology, UW - Will present relational event models on tent displacement events in REACH data.
  • 09/27/2024 Hugo A. Aguas, PhD Student Sociology, UW - California's Homeless Provider Burnout
  • 08/15/2024 Data Science for Social Good Fellows will present on a focus group around people's experience with a new PIT counting method
  • 07/19/2024 Daniel Malone, Executive Director, DESC
  • 06/07/2024 Elizabeth Nova, PhD Sociology Student, UW, presenting on Vehicular Living
  • 05/17/2024 Aja Sutton, Postdoc Stanford University, presenting on ETS REACH data
  • 05/10/2024 Nora VanRees and Alison Smith, Undergraduate UW, presenting on PIT methods
  • 05/03/2024 David Coomes, PhD Epidemiology student, UW, presenting on KCPH data
  • 04/19/2024 Adam Visokay, PhD Sociology Student, UW, presenting on Verbal Autopsy

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