Conferences and Workshops

The Social Networks and Health (SN&H) workshop, sponsored by the Duke Network Analysis Center (DNAC) and DUPRI, offers comprehensive training in network methods for health scholars. Thanks to generous support from the NIH, we offer this training completely free of charge.  

SN&H covers topics in social network analysis related to studying health behaviors, including:

DUPRI will be hosting a workshop, Collecting Web-based Data using R, on March 16. This 4-hour training (one morning and one afternoon session) provides an introduction to collecting web-based data using R. It will cover making HTTP requests, web scraping, working with structured or scraped web data, interacting with APIs, and obtaining open data. Some prior experience using R is recommended. Session Details Date: Wednesday, March 16 Location: Erwin Mill A103 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM: Morning session 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM: Break 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM: Afternoon session Prior to the workshop, please download and install R (https://cran.r-project.org/) and RStudio (https://rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/#download/) on your computer. If you need assistance with set up, please contact Mark Yacoub at mark.yacoub@duke.edu. To attend this event, you must RSVP to laura.satterfield@duke.edu no later than Monday, March 14.

On March 2-3, 2022, the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Behavioral and Social Research will convene a workshop with subject matter experts to discuss gaps, opportunities, and strategies for adapting individual behavior change interventions to leverage social network dynamics. The workshop will focus on how social network interventions can be leveraged to promote healthy aging, slowing of cognitive decline and prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (AD/ADRD), and improved care for persons living with AD/ADRD and their care partners. March 4 will be a closed session for workshop speakers and NIH staff.

DUPRI will be hosting an Introduction to R virtual workshop. This 4-hour training (one morning and one afternoon session) will introduce you to the R programming language for statistical computing. The class is suitable for beginners who have never used R and is geared toward users of Stata/SAS/SPSS. To attend this event, you must RSVP to laura.satterfield@duke.edu no later than Monday, February 14.

The Department of Medicine announces that Tyson Brown, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology; Director of the Center on Health & Society, Duke Social Science Research Institute and Inaugural Duke Presidential Fellow (2021-2022) will be the featured speaker at the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Grand Rounds. His presentation is: “Toward Racial Health Equity: Critical Population Health Perspectives" and will be held on Friday, January 14, 2022, at 12:00 pm via Zoom.

DUPRI will be hosting a workshop, Generalized Linear Models in R, on November 19. This 4-hour training will cover the basics of running GLMs in R, including specification and syntax, interpretation and displaying of results, and model checking. We will examine binary, count, and categorical models. Some prior experience using R is recommended.

DUPRI will be hosting a workshop, Multilevel Modeling in R, on December 3. This 4-hour training will cover the basics of running multilevel models in R, including specification and syntax, interpretation and displaying of results, and model checking and comparison. Some prior experience using R is recommended.

Springboard To Opportunities launched The Magnolia Mother’s Trust in 2018, creating an initiative that provides $1,000 cash on a monthly basis to low-income Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi—no strings attached—for one year. Now in its third cohort, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust program has supported more than 200 families. While there had been several initiatives for a guaranteed income worldwide, this was the first that specifically targeted extremely low-income families headed by Black women living in affordable housing in the United States. Preliminary findings show significant increases in participants’ ability to pay all bills on time without support, budget more money for food and household costs, save money for an emergency, and purchase health insurance for their family. Since its founding in 2017, the Economic Security Project (ESP) has been at the forefront of the national conversation around guaranteed income. ESP’s support helped launch the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, the first ever mayor-led pilot in the nation that provided 125 Stockton residents with $500 monthly payments for two years. This pilot laid the foundation for the creation of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and similar guaranteed income initiatives in cities across the country. ESP has also fought for meaningful cash programs in the policy arena through its work advocating for expansion and modernization of the Earned Income Tax Credit, recurring stimulus checks during COVID-19, and codifying the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Learn more from Foster and Nyandoro about how findings from their work provide the foundation to make permanent the Biden Administration’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit, and how that could be a stepping stone for a full federal guaranteed income program.

The Graduate School launched the Race and Bias Conversations in fall 2020 to help the Graduate School community better understand the many facets of systemic racism and bias and to keep those issues at the forefront of the community's consciousness as it works toward making Duke a more inclusive and supportive environment. Last year's series included six events featuring graduate students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, exploring topics such as desegregation of higher education in the South; policing and communities; racial economic inequality; and obstacles and opportunities for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in higher education. Tyson H. Brown, Associate Professor of Sociology, will lead the conversation.