Victoria Sass

Ph.D., Sociology University of Washington, Seattle

• Dissertation: An Iatrogenic Imperative: Weight-Goal Pursuit and Morbidity from Adolescence to Adulthood

M.A., Sociology University of Washington, Seattle

• Thesis: The Great Decline: Toxic Air Pollution and Neighborhood Dynamics
• Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods Center for Studies in
  Demography & Ecology

B.A. (with Honors), Sociology and History University of California, Davis

• General emphasis in Sociology with concentrations in African and West Asian History

CoLab for Community & Behavioral Health Policy Department of Psychiatry
  and Behavioral Sciences,
University of Washington
Graduate Research Assistant,
H-SYNC Program Evaluation

• Designed and executed a summative evaluation of the Housing Stability for Youth in Courts (H-SYNC) pilot, estimating program impact on youth recidivism by extracting, cleaning, matching, and validating individual-level records across two large administrative databases (assessments; court contact and recidivism) and program service data in partnership with CoLab Director.
• Built a documented, version-controlled (Git/GitHub) R pipeline covering ingestion, linkage, matched comparison-group construction (parallelized selection optimizing covariate balance across 21 demographic and risk metrics), survival analysis, and visualization — fully reproducible for future cohorts.
• Centered equity in the evaluation design by estimating differential program impacts by sex, race, ethnicity, and geography; translated findings into visualizations and written summaries for non-technical program staff and system partners; results in preparation for publication.

Center for Social Science Computation & Research University of Washington
Computational Research and Data Consultant

• Serve as technical subject matter expert for students, staff, and faculty across the social sciences, advising on statistical software, data management, database access, and reproducible research practice, and resolving data problems spanning extraction, cleaning, reshaping, merging, and validation.
• Design and teach quarterly R workshops that make statistical programming accessible to researchers of widely varying technical backgrounds.

Doctoral Candidate Department of Sociology,
University of Washington

• Designed and executed a three-study longitudinal analysis of adolescent-to-adult behavioral, cardiometabolic, and mental health outcomes using restricted-access Add Health data (N ≈ 15,000; five waves, 1994–2018), conducted entirely within a secure data enclave under strict disclosure controls.
• Built an end-to-end reproducible pipeline in R, SQL (DuckDB), and Git — raw multi-wave files through harmonized analytic tables, survey-weighted model estimation, and automated publication-ready tables and figures — including custom functions and tooling reused across all three studies.
• Applied advanced statistical methods: a supervised machine-learning pipeline (gradient-boosted trees) to detect and correct anomalous measurements, and survey-weighted regression under a complex sampling design testing mediation, effect modification, and sensitivity to unmeasured confounding.
• Built a reusable R visualization system (ggplot2, gt, gtsummary) and a Quarto/reveal.js presentation making multi-model findings legible to mixed expert and lay audiences; findings document how a racialized, weight-centered health paradigm patterns health behaviors and outcomes by sex, race, socioeconomic origin, and neighborhood; in preparation for publication.

Multi-State Study of Monetary Sanctions (PI: Alexes Harris) Department of Sociology,
University of Washington
Graduate Research Assistant

• Cleaned and structured large, unstandardized King County Superior Court administrative records as part of an eight-state study of monetary sanctions and their consequences for low-income defendants — applying regular expressions and text-as-data methods in R to extract variables from free-text fields and executing complex joins to deliver an analysis-ready dataset.

Demographic Vulnerability, Neighborhood Pollution,Department of Sociology,
University of Washington
and Racial Health Disparities (PI: Kyle Crowder)
Graduate Research Assistant

• Helped build a multilevel longitudinal dataset for an NIH-funded study of racial health disparities, linking Panel Study of Income Dynamics health and life-history records to modeled neighborhood pollution concentrations (EPA and other sources) and census measures of neighborhood conditions.
• Estimated longitudinal multilevel models of pollution exposures’ effects on health, linking place-, race-, and policy-driven inequities to measurable outcomes; co-authored three peer-reviewed publications, including first-authored work in Health & Place (2017).

National Analysis of Rental Markets Using Scraped College of Built Environments,
University of Washington
Online Data (PIs: Rebecca Walter and Arthur Acolin)
Summer Graduate Research Assistant

• Contributed data collection, processing, and analysis to an NSF-funded study of scraped online rental-listing data, including a visualization dashboard presenting results to non-technical community users; co-authored one publication (Cityscape, 2021).

Interface Demography Department of Sociology,
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Doctoral Researcher

• Quantified socioeconomic inequalities in cancer incidence, survival, and mortality using individually linked, population-scale administrative records — Belgian national census, emigration and mortality registers, and Cancer Registry — accessed in a secure on-site environment under strict EU data privacy and disclosure governance.
• Constructed multidimensional socioeconomic indicators from census records and applied survival analysis, life table methods, and regression to decompose mortality inequalities into incidence and survival components, identifying where health inequities emerge and where policy intervention is possible.
• Co-authored two publications from the project (Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, 2021; Springer, 2021).

In the U.S. visiting family when pandemic travel restrictions took effect in March 2020. Because EU data protection requirements permitted access to the cancer registry records only on-site in Brussels, the work could not continue remotely; I documented and transitioned the analysis to my colleagues and redirected my dissertation to a new project.

Southern Exit-Voice Dynamics in the Jim Crow South Department of Sociology,
University of Washington
(PI: Stewart Tolnay)
Graduate Research Assistant

• Constructed a multilevel analytic dataset integrating four archival and administrative sources with no common identifier — auditing missingness and coverage, reconstructing county FIPS codes, and resolving unit-of-analysis and boundary-change issues to enable linkage; co-authored “Migration and Protest in the Jim Crow South,” Social Science Research (2018).

Data Science for Social Good Fellow eScience Institute,
University of Washington

• Established proof of concept that 21 million ORCA fare-payment records could support regional transit planning and evaluation, characterizing the geographic and socio-demographic bias from cash-paying riders to define the conditions under which the data could support valid policy conclusions.
• Engineered complex SQL joins across fare-transaction, vehicle-location, and sensor data on a secure AWS RDS instance, constructing journey identifiers to reconstruct ~15.5 million multi-agency trips from disconnected boarding records.
• Built an R/Shiny application linking trips to census-tract demographics (race/ethnicity, vehicle access, SNAP participation), foregrounding equity by showing which communities the system connected and which it underserved; co-designed the shared dashboard architecture used by non-technical planners.

Toward a Cross-Platform Framework: Assessing the Comprehensiveness of Online Rental Listings. Cityscape (Washington, DC) 23(2):327.

Ana Costa, Victoria Sass, Ian Kennedy, Roshni Roy, Rebecca J. Walter, Arthur Acolin, Kyle Crowder, Chris Hess, Alex Ramiller, and Sarah Chasins

Social Disparities in Survival from Head and Neck Cancers in Europe. Social Environment and Cancer in Europe. Springer, p. 141-158.

Victoria Sass and Sylvie Gadeyne

Social Inequalities in Cancer Survival in Belgium: A Population-Based Cohort Study. Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention 30(1):45.

Michael Rosskamp, Julie Verbeeck, Victoria Sass, Sylvie Gadeyne, Freija Verdoodt, and Harlinde De Schutter

Residential Segregation and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Ambient Air Pollution. Race and Social Problems, 11(1) 60-67.

Bongki Woo, Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, Victoria Sass, Kyle Crowder, Samantha Teixeira, David Takeuchi

Migration and Protest in the Jim Crow South. Social Science Research, 73:13-30.

Stewart E. Tolnay, Woody E. Beck, and Victoria Sass

The Effects of Air Pollution on Individual Psychological Distress. Health and Place, 48:72-79.

Victoria Sass, Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, Steven M. Karceski, Anjum Hajat, Kyle Crowder, David Takeuchi

The Long-Term Dynamics of Racial-Ethnic Inequality in Neighborhood Air Pollution Exposure, 1990–2009. Du Bois Review, Volume 13 - Issue 2.

Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, Kyle Crowder, Anjum Hajat, and Victoria Sass

Paper Session: The Environment and Population Health — Session Chair

Population Association of America Annual Meeting Atlanta, GA

Paper Session: Climate Change and Health. — Discussant

Population Association of America Annual Meeting Virtual

Socioeconomic inequalities in cancer mortality in Belgium. — Paper Presentation

Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Annual Meeting Seattle, WA

Reframing ‘obesity’ research using a weight-neutral approach — Paper Presentation

Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Annual Meeting Seattle, WA

The Effects of Air Pollution on Individual Psychological Distress — Paper Presentation

American Public Health Association Annual Meeting Paper Presentation. Atlanta, GA

Air Pollution and Mental Health — Plenary Session (invited speaker)

Cascadia Symposium on Environmental, Occupational, and Population Health Abbotsford, BC

The Long-Term Dynamics of Racial-Ethnic Inequality in Neighborhood Air Pollution Exposure, 1990-2009 — Poster Session

Population Association of America Annual Meeting Washington, D.C.

Excellence in Teaching (Graduate Student) Department of Sociology
University of Washington

Poster Session Winner: Migration, Urbanization, Population, Development, & Environment

Population Association of America Annual Meeting Washington, D.C.

Excellence in Teaching (Graduate Student) Department of Sociology
University of Washington

Graduate Student Association Department of Sociology,
University of Washington
President

Elected to lead departmental graduate governance, representing graduate students to faculty and administration and coordinating association activities across the year.

Social Determinants of Health Working Group
Organizer & Member

Led and participated in an interdisciplinary group convening researchers from multiple universities around the social and structural determinants of health.

Community Resilience + Equity Program King County Public Health
Community Partner

Collaborated with county public-health staff to explore participatory, community-engaged research approaches for environmental-justice work, translating findings from first-authored research on air pollution and psychological distress toward applied public-health practice.