Diana Graizbord is a third year Ph.D. student in Sociology. She holds an M.A from The Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Policy (The New School) and a B.A from Sarah Lawrence College. Her interests lie at the intersection of political sociology, the political economy of development, and social welfare. Her dissertation research explores the relationship among state, expert, and civil society actors (both national and international) in the making and administration of Mexico's model anti-poverty policy. As an S4 Fellow she has been working (with Marcelo Bohrt) on a spatial measure of state developmental capacity. The current project assesses variation in the state's presence in the areas of health, education and basic services, within and across South Africa's cities.

Marcelo Bohrt Seeghers is a second year Ph.D. student in Sociology. He holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Broadly, he is interested in political sociology, race and ethnicity, and inequality. In his M.A. thesis, he assesses the extent to which local participatory institutions incorporate the previously excluded into the political system through a study of political participation in municipal meetings in Bolivia. In his dissertation research, he expects to study the question of how privileged social groups in multiethnic societies respond to privilege and status threats by subordinate groups. He is currently involved in two collaborative research projects: an ethnographic study of the development of the Knowledge District in Providence, RI (with Jamie McPike), and a study of the developmental capacity of the state in South Africa (with Diana Graizbord). The latter develops a spatial measure of state developmental capacity to assess variation in the state's presence in the areas of health, education and basic services, within and across South Africa's cities.

Amy is a 4th year graduate student in the PhD program in sociology. Her research focuses on the spatial implications of urban governance regimes. Specifically, her work examines the varied successes of municipal governments in both Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa in addressing the history of spatial and racial inequality in the provision of basic household services inherited from apartheid. This work takes into account variation in relationships between local government and civil society actors as well as intra-governmental dynamics in creating more equitable patterns of service delivery. At the 2008 meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Amy presented on another research project examining the relationship between the racial composition of neighborhoods in New Orleans and the potential for exposure to toxins. She also recently taught an introductory workshop in spatial methods and GIS at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. At Brown, she is affiliated with S4 as well as the Watson Institute for International Studies.

Sze (Sam) Liu is a 3rd year student in the PhD program in Epidemiology where she is funded on a National Institute of Aging predoctoral fellowship. In addition, she is completing a second master’s degree in Sociology. Sam’s research interests include health disparities from a life-course perspective, neighborhood effects, and spatial analysis. At the 2007 American Public Health Association annual meeting she presented on neighborhood characteristics associated with hospital readmissions for pediatric asthma in Rhode Island and residential modifications and physical decline among community-dwelling elderly. Sam also completed a summer internship at the NYC DOHMH World Trade Center Registry Spatial Analysis Unit in 2007.

Adam Storeygard is a graduate student in economics, focusing on empirical urban and development economics. His work reflects a longstanding interest in spatial patterns and processes. Before arriving at Brown, he was at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University, where he participated in several mostly spatially-oriented population-environment and global health research and data development projects, co-authoring papers that have appeared in journals including Nature and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. He also assisted in the development and teaching of spatial data analysis training workshops in New York and co-taught one in Germany. Adam has an M Phil in Environment and Development from the University of Cambridge and a BA from Harvard University in physics. At Brown, he is also affiliated with the Population Studies and Training Center.

Weiwei Zhang is a 2nd year graduate student in Sociology. Her primary research interests include immigration assimilation and race/ethnic relations in the U.S. from both substantive and methodological perspectives. Her training at Brown in spatial and other quantitative methods has led to numerous applications using these methods. At the 2008 annual meeting of the Population Association of America, she will present a study using the 2000 U.S. Census of the impact of recent immigration on existing residential patterns. She is also working on historical racial/ethnic residential segregation in U.S. cities using the 1880 Census. At Brown, she is affiliated with both S4 and the Population Studies and Training Center.

Hongwei is a 6th year graduate student in the PhD program in sociology. His research focuses on spatial inquiries into population dynamics. Specifically, he examines how spatial features including scale, proximity, and boundary are related to demographic and population health processes such as residential segregation, exposure to health risks, and disease diffusion. His dissertation uses individual location data to identify ethnic neighborhoods using Bayesian spatial methods, and then incorporates neighborhood as a predictor of child mortality in Newark, New Jersey, in 1880. Other ongoing work links county-level contextual information to the individual-level data of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and examines the longitudinal association between spatially measured degree of segregation and individuals' risk of obesity during 1981-2008. Hongwei is also interested in developing and applying new techniques to solve methodological challenges such as spatial autocorrelation, misalignment, and scale-dependency in spatial modeling.