One of the most exclusive groups at the UW also happens to be among the most well-funded population study resources in the country. The Center for the Study of Demography and Ecology (CSDE) supports researchers primarily from the UW; the center also has ties to Western Washington University, the Batelle Institute and the University of Victoria.

Why is CSDE so exclusive? To become an affiliate of the center, one must be invited by another affiliate. All researchers with the CSDE are faculty from different disciplines: sociology, anthropology, geography, history, psychology, statistics, public affairs, public health, international studies and social work. There are currently 55 UW faculty listed as affiliated researchers of CSDE, and several graduate and post-doctoral fellows are funded by the center.

"The goals of the CSDE are to provide technical and administrative support for path-breaking research on population and public health issues in the social sciences, to train the next generation of population scholars, and to foster an interdisciplinary intellectual community of researchers on the UW campus and in the Pacific Northwest," said Shelly Lundberg, president of CSDE and a professor of economics.

Information core director Molly McNees added, "We are a center that provides support and infrastructure for researchers who are doing population studies to help them do more innovative research and to be more productive in their research."

That support structure for researchers includes the information core (which assists with maintaining the CSDE Web site, writing research briefs for the public and popularizing the work of the center's researchers) and provides services in statistics (to help researchers analyze and manage data), administration (which aids affiliates in filing grant applications and drafting budgets for special projects), computing (which assists researchers with computer resources and software) and biodemography (which gives affiliates access to labs for storing biological specimens and examining biomarkers in population research).

The first regional population studies center was established at the UW in 1947 as the Office of Population Research under the sociology department; in 1967, it became the CSDE and gradually grew to adopt an increasingly international scope and multidisciplinary perspective.

"One of our big activities is our Friday afternoon seminars," said McNees. "Every Friday at 12:30 p.m., we have a speaker; sometimes it's one of our affiliates, sometimes it's an invited guest from someplace in the country who is doing significant work in demography...They're open to students and it's a time when affiliates can all get together and there can be that opportunity for scholarly exchange."

The center now draws millions of dollars in government funding.

"One thing that the university [community] should know is that CSDE plays a key role in bringing additional resources, including federal and foundation funding, into the social sciences on campus," said Lundberg.

Now a major population center that brings in more than $22.7 million in research grants (most of which come from the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation), CSDE hopes to attract more graduate students with more lucrative grants and push the envelops of population research.

"My objective as the new director of CSDE is ... to increase graduate student funding and the recruitment and retention of minority graduate students, and to foster collaborations and the development of innovative new research projects," said Lundberg.

Undergraduates are also increasingly becoming a presence in the CSDE as researchers for major projects run by faculty.

"One outcome [of increased funding] is improved opportunities for undergraduate research experiences in the social sciences," said Lundberg.

Sociology professor Stewart Tolnay's research for the CSDE involves compiling a database of Southern lynchings between 1882 and 1930 using household and personal records as well as census data; the data can be viewed at Ancestry.com. Tolnay utilized his grant funding to provide undergraduate students with computers to access census documents and other historical records.

"The CSDE has just been critically important for the project," said Tolnay. "I think it's only recently that faculty researchers have been incorporating undergraduates in their research projects. We have a team of undergraduate students who need access to computers and they're doing online searches of census manuscripts and selective services records and all kinds of historical records at the same time. It requires a lot of storage and computing power, and the staff at CSDE has just been great about setting them up. [The undergraduates] work there and they feel welcome in the lab."

Overall, affiliates are thankful for the support CSDE provides and are impressed by its vast resources.

"CSDE is phenomenal," said post-doctoral fellow Tony Perez, who came to the UW from the University of Michigan in December. Perez researches racial classification and categorization, alleging that despite increasing instances of interracial marriages and racial blending that racial inequality in various public sectors still exists. "I'll admit I was skeptical [about CSDE] to begin with — Michigan has one of the biggest funded population studies program. UW is one of seven schools that has a major population center that is funded by the federal government."

Tolnay pointed out that funding from the National Institute of Health was very prestigious, saying, "They only give those awards to the universities which have the strongest community of population researchers."

Perez said that a large part of his research has been looking at national census data over the last 25 years and running that information through a computer to analyze it. The CSDE was able to provide him with a high-powered server to do the job.

"This was stuff that wasn't even possible to do five years ago and even to this day," said Perez. "I literally took every person in the U.S. measured from the census from 1980 to 2005 and was able to conduct studies using CSDE's server. The pop center here is really second to none in terms of its resources."

Reach reporter Tiffany Wan at features@thedaily.washington.edu.