About

Sara R. Curran joined the faculty of the University of Washington's Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance in 2005. She holds the positions of Professor of International Studies, Professor of Sociology, and Professor of Public Policy & Governance. Additionally, she is an Adjunct Professor of Global Health and affiliate faculty of the Center for Global Studies, the Southeast Asian Center, the Technology and Social Change Group (TASCHA), and EarthLab. Curran earned her B.S. in Natural Resource Management from the University of Michigan, an M.S. in Sociology and Economics from North Carolina State University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently serves as director of the University of Washington's Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology and as Associate Vice Provost for Research in the Office of Research, where she chaired a Task Force on Advancing Equity in Research with activities planned to build on the report's recommendations in 2024. Her research focuses on demographic dynamics, gender, migration, and environmental issues across global contexts. Current projects include improving small area population estimates, studying social change and migration dynamics, examining the impacts of climate change and natural disasters on population change, and conducting applied research and training related to global studies. Curran has contributed extensively to the academic literature with work published in leading journals such as the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Demography, Population and Development Review, and Social Forces. She is also engaged in interdisciplinary collaborations and leadership roles in national and international research consortia and editorial boards. Curran is passionate about social science research methods and has co-edited a handbook on social science field research. She actively participates in public discourse and policy discussions related to demographic diversity, census data, migration, and social connection and well-being. Her lectures and public talks often address the historical, political, and statistical aspects of demographic diversity and its implications for democracy and policymaking. Through her interdisciplinary approach, she contributes to advancing understanding of population trends, environmental challenges, and social inequalities worldwide.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Medical education
• Economics
• Environmental planning
• Geography
• Engineering
• Pedagogy
• Environmental science
• Medicine
• Environmental resource management
• Management science
• Law
• Gender studies
• Agroforestry
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Ecology

Selected publications

• Editorial Note Regarding Begum et al. (2018), Hammar et al. (2025), and Begum et al. (2025)

  Demography · 2025-12-01

  editorialOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Evaluation of Projection Methods for Detailed Small Area Projections: An Application and Validation to King County, Washington

  Population Research and Policy Review · 2024-02-29 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Higher education students’ conceptions of learning gain

  Active Learning in Higher Education · 2024-08-28 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Learning gain in higher education, specifically the development of subject-adjacent skills, abilities and competencies, is of key scholarly and policy relevance. However, little research focuses on students’ broad understandings of learning gain. This paper takes a phenomenographic approach to explore students’ conceptions of learning gain, and how these may differ by subject and stage of study. Drawing on thirty-three qualitative interviews with a diverse group of undergraduate and postgraduate students across four subjects in three UK universities, this paper derives three distinct categories of understanding in relation to learning gain, increasing in complexity. The first category, naïve understandings, is characterised by short-term learning goals, the prioritisation of surface approaches to learning including memorisation, with subject knowledge more important than skills. Motivations to learn are broadly extrinsic and related to assessments. The second category, emergent understandings, features greater awareness of approaches to learning, including structured planning of learning activities in response to a range of goals, and pragmatic responses to desirable learning outcomes. There is growing recognition of links between subject-specific and generic skills, and adaptation features strongly. The most sophisticated category, comprehensive understandings, is characterised by flexible learning goals, the acknowledgment of the independent nature of higher education learning and strong self-regulation, with deep approaches to learning consciously prioritised. Dynamic views of knowledge prevail, which distinguish this category from the other two. These categories of understanding grow in complexity with study stage, and also vary by subject of study, with interactions present in relation to prioritised aspects of learning gain, views of change and how explicit aspects of learning gain are made within the subject of study. Any attempt to capture learning gain for its improvement would therefore need to encompass a variety of aspects of learning gain, contextualised for subject and stage and include a student perspective.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Examining Barriers to Practice and Career Development among Non-Female GYN Radiation Oncologists and Non-Male GU Radiation Oncologists: A Nationwide Survey

  International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics · 2024-09-27

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Probabilistic County-Level Population Projections

  Demography · 2023-05-22 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Population projections provide predictions of future population sizes for an area. Historically, most population projections have been produced using deterministic or scenario-based approaches and have not assessed uncertainty about future population change. Starting in 2015, however, the United Nations (UN) has produced probabilistic population projections for all countries using a Bayesian approach. There is also considerable interest in subnational probabilistic population projections, but the UN's national approach cannot be used directly for this purpose, because within-country correlations in fertility and mortality are generally larger than between-country ones, migration is not constrained in the same way, and there is a need to account for college and other special populations, particularly at the county level. We propose a Bayesian method for producing subnational population projections, including migration and accounting for college populations, by building on but modifying the UN approach. We illustrate our approach by applying it to the counties of Washington State and comparing the results with extant deterministic projections produced by Washington State demographers. Out-of-sample experiments show that our method gives accurate and well-calibrated forecasts and forecast intervals. In most cases, our intervals were narrower than the growth-based intervals issued by the state, particularly for shorter time horizons.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Managing and minimizing online survey questionnaire fraud: lessons from the Triple C project

  International Journal of Social Research Methodology · 2023-07-03 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access

  With the increasing sophistication of online survey tools and the necessity of distanced research during the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of online questionnaires for research purposes has proliferated. Still, many researchers undertake online survey research without knowledge of the prevalence and likelihood of experiencing survey questionnaire fraud nor familiarity with measures used to identify fraud once it has occurred. This research note is based on the experience of researchers across four sites who implemented an online survey of families' experiences with COVID-19 in the U.S. that was subject to substantial fraud. By the end of data collection, over 70% of responses were flagged as fraudulent with duplicate IP addresses and concurrent start/end times representing the most common indicators of fraud observed. We offer lessons learned to illustrate the sophisticated nature of fraud in online research and the importance of multi-pronged strategies to detect and limit online survey questionnaire fraud.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Viral Infections, Race, and Age in the United States

  2023-09-27

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Bibliometric analysis of published literature on the determinants of family planning

  2023-05-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Abandoned land: Overestimated potential

  Science · 2023-07-20 · 4 citations

  letterOpen access

  Article MetricsDownloadsCitationsNo data available.05010015023 Jul 202330 Jul 202306 Aug 202313 Aug 20231,2900TotalFirst 30 Days6 Months12 MonthsTotal number of downloads for the first 30 days after content publication

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Analyzing Tweeting Patterns and Public Engagement on Twitter During the Recognition Period of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Study of Two U.S. States

  IEEE Access · 2022-01-01 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access

  The abundance of available information on social media can provide invaluable insights into people's responses to health information and public health guidance concerning COVID-19. This study examines tweeting patterns and public engagement on Twitter, as forms of social media, related to public health messaging in two U.S. states (Washington and Louisiana) during the early stage of the pandemic. We analyze more than 7M tweets and 571K COVID-19-related tweets posted by users in the two states over the first 25 days of the pandemic in the U.S. (Feb. 23, 2020, to Mar. 18, 2020). We also qualitatively code and examine 460 tweets posted by selected governmental official accounts during the same period for public engagement analysis. We use various methods for analyzing the data, including statistical analysis, sentiment analysis, and word usage metrics, to find inter- and intra-state disparities of tweeting patterns and public engagement with health messaging. Our findings reveal that users in Washington were more active on Twitter than users in Louisiana in terms of the total number and density of COVID-19-related tweets during the early stage of the pandemic. Our correlation analysis results for counties or parishes show that the Twitter activities (tweet density, COVID-19 tweet density, and user density) were positively correlated with population density in both states at the 0.01 level of significance. Our sentiment analysis results demonstrate that the average daily sentiment scores of all and COVID-19-related tweets in Washington were consistently higher than those in Louisiana during this period. While the daily average sentiment scores of COVID-19-related tweets were in the negative range, the scores of all tweets were in the positive range in both states. Lastly, our analysis of governmental Twitter accounts found that these accounts' messages were most commonly meant to spread information about the pandemic, but that users were most likely to engage with tweets that requested readers take action, such as hand washing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Administrative Core

  NIH · $10.4M · 2002–2027

• Developmental Infrastructure Core

  NIH · $12.4M · 2016–2017

• Population Research Training

  NIH · $2.3M · 2002–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Filiz Garip

  7 shared

• Wendy Cadge

  Brandeis University

  7 shared

• Christine Leibbrand

  University of Washington

  7 shared

• Meryl J. Williams

  6 shared

• Tundi Agardy

  6 shared

• Peggy Levitt

  Wellesley College

  5 shared

• Barbara Entwisle

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  5 shared

• Wolfgang Lutz

  International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

  5 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology

  University of North Carolina

  1994

• MS, Sociology

  North Carolina State University

  1989

• BS, School of Environmental Affairs and Sciences

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1983