Alexes Harris is the Presidential Term Professor and Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. Dr. Harris’ work has spanned the criminal justice system, including juvenile justice, case processing outcomes, and monetary sanctions. Her research is fundamentally centered around issues of inequality, poverty and race in United States’ systems of justice.

Morhaf Al Achkar, MD, Ph.D. was born in Aleppo-Syria and migrated to the United States after finishing medical school. He obtained a Ph.D. in Research Inquiry Methodology in Social Sciences from Indiana University School of Education. Currently, he is a practicing family physician and a faculty member at the University of Washington. Morhaf will present his methodology to interviewing 40 cancer patient experiences, including his experience with a lung cancer diagnosis in 2016.

Mario L. Barnes is the Toni Rembe Dean of the University of Washington School of Law and a nationally recognized scholar for his research on the legal and social implications of race and gender, primarily in the areas of employment, education, criminal and military law.

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences.

Tasha Fairfield holds a Ph.D in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her comparative politics research analyzes the political economy of inequality, the politics of policy formulation, and business-state relations in Latin America. Her methodological research examines the Bayesian logic of inference in qualitative social science.

Katya Drozdova is an associate professor of political science in the School of Business, Government, and Economics at Seattle Pacific University. Dr. Drozdova used information theory to lay out a systematic

Anna Zelenz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, UW. Her talk focused on Ethnography’s unique role in the Social Sciences and its use of quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques based on participant observation and ethnographic interviews conducted from her research in the Palestinian West Bank.

Paula Holmes-Eber is a professor of anthropology and an affiliate in the Department of Middle East Studies and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, UW. Holmes-Eber presented her research and fieldwork experience conducted in the Middle East and how using the mixed-method approach – a combination of interviews, participant observation, and surveys create large N data corroborates a researcher’s findings and arguments.

Berkay Gulen is a Ph.D. candidate in International Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, UW. Gulen is currently researching decision-making mechanisms in Turkey’s foreign policy change between 1991 and 2014 and discussed sampling and interview techniques in preparation for conducting field research.

Anissa Tanweer is a research scientist at the eScience Institute, UW focused on human-centered data science. Her work incorporates a range of qualitative methods for studying the practice and culture of data-intensive computational work, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation. At her QUAL Speaker Series talk, Tanweer highlighted some challenges common for ethnographers but also presented some unique ethical tensions and recalled her own research issues and offered approaches to addressing them.