Zack Almquist

About

Professor Almquist specializes in developing and applying innovative methodologies to address complex social challenges. His research spans statistics and survey methodology, housing and homelessness, demography and population health, and environmental governance, united by a commitment to advancing both social science methods and real-world policy impact.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Geography
• Medicine
• Virology
• Biology
• Environmental health
• Demography
• Ecology
• Economics
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• Spatial heterogeneity can lead to substantial local variations in COVID-19 timing and severity

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 136 citations

  Standard epidemiological models for COVID-19 employ variants of compartment (SIR or susceptible-infectious-recovered) models at local scales, implicitly assuming spatially uniform local mixing. Here, we examine the effect of employing more geographically detailed diffusion models based on known spatial features of interpersonal networks, most particularly the presence of a long-tailed but monotone decline in the probability of interaction with distance, on disease diffusion. Based on simulations…

  DOI

• The Ecology of Unsheltered Homelessness: Environmental and Social-Network Predictors of Well-Being among an Unsheltered Homeless Population

  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · 2021 · 61 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  < 0.01). Additionally, participants who experienced a conflict with a social contact in the past 30 days had lower emotional well-being scores than participants who experienced no conflict. Finally, women had worse general health and emotional well-being than men. Ecologically framed research about health and well-being among PEH is critically needed, especially as climate change threatens to increase the danger of many homeless environments.

  DOI

• Geographical patterns of social cohesion drive disparities in early COVID infection hazard

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 21 citations

  The uneven spread of COVID-19 has resulted in disparate experiences for marginalized populations in urban centers. Using computational models, we examine the effects of local cohesion on COVID-19 spread in social contact networks for the city of San Francisco, finding that more early COVID-19 infections occur in areas with strong local cohesion. This spatially correlated process tends to affect Black and Hispanic communities more than their non-Hispanic White counterparts. Local social cohesion…

  DOI

• Recommendations for sharing network data and materials

  Network Science · 2024-10-30 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  One of the goals of open science is to promote the transparency and accessibility of research. Sharing data and materials used in network research is critical to these goals. In this paper, we present recommendations for whether, what, when, and where network data and materials should be shared. We recommend that network data and materials should be shared, but access to or use of shared data and materials may be restricted if necessary to avoid harm or comply with regulations. Researchers shoul…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Uncovering migration systems through spatio-temporal tensor co-clustering

  Scientific Reports · 2024-11-06 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A central problem in the study of human mobility is that of migration systems. Typically, migration systems are defined as a set of relatively stable movements of people between two or more locations over time. While these emergent systems are expected to vary over time, they ideally contain a stable underlying structure that could be discovered empirically. There have been some notable attempts to formally or informally define migration systems. However, they have been limited by being hard to…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Measuring and Modeling the Multi-Modal Networks and Demographics of People Experiencing Homelessness

  NSF · $393k · 2022–2027

Frequent coauthors

• Carter T. Butts

  University of California, Irvine

  33 shared

• Emma S. Spiro

  12 shared

• Benjamin E. Bagozzi

  University of Delaware

  9 shared

• John R. Hipp

  University of California, Irvine

  7 shared

• Abhirup Mallik

  7 shared

• Li Zeng

  Nanchang University

  5 shared

• Loring J. Thomas

  University of California, Irvine

  5 shared

• Fan Yin

  5 shared

Labs

• The Social, Spatial, and Dynamic Analysis LabPI

  works on a range of problems related to social networks, organizations, technology, and space

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  University of California, Irvine

• M.A., Sociology

  University of California, Irvine

• M.A., Demography

  University of California, Irvine

• M.S., Statistics

  Northwestern University

• B.S., Mathematics

  University of Oregon

Awards & honors

• Leo Goodman Award
• Outstanding Dissertation Award
• NSF’s CAREER Award
• ARO’s Young Investigator Program Award

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• Kyle Crowderh-51
• Alexes Harrish-18
• Nathalie Williamsh-18