Strategic Growth Area: Policy

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10919/79480
The Policy SGA is a dynamic hub with spokes, focused on undergraduate through doctoral education, research, and scholarship. The policy hub brings together teams of experts with different, but complementary specializations and comprehensive policy expertise in key areas. The spokes of the hub connect to and integrate this expertise within and across the destination areas to translate scholarship to practice through the complex decision-making processes of policy making, implementation, and evaluation.

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Browsing Strategic Growth Area: Policy by Department "Industrial and Systems Engineering"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    A Dynamic Model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for Military Personnel and Veterans
    Ghaffarzadegan, Navid; Ebrahimvandi, Alireza; Jalali, Mohammad S. (PLOS, 2016-10-07)
    Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stands out as a major mental illness; however, little is known about effective policies for mitigating the problem. The importance and complexity of PTSD raise critical questions: What are the trends in the population of PTSD patients among military personnel and veterans in the postwar era? What policies can help mitigate PTSD? To address these questions, we developed a system dynamics simulation model of the population of military personnel and veterans affected by PTSD. The model includes both military personnel and veterans in a "system of systems." This is a novel aspect of our model, since many policies implemented at the military level will potentially influence (and may have side effects on) veterans and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The model is first validated by replicating the historical data on PTSD prevalence among military personnel and veterans from 2000 to 2014 (datasets from the Department of Defense, the Institute of Medicine, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and other sources). The model is then used for health policy analysis. Our results show that, in an optimistic scenario based on the status quo of deployment to intense/combat zones, estimated PTSD prevalence among veterans will be at least 10% during the next decade. The model postulates that during wars, resiliency-related policies are the most effective for decreasing PTSD. In a postwar period, current health policy interventions (e.g., screening and treatment) have marginal effects on mitigating the problem of PTSD, that is, the current screening and treatment policies must be revolutionized to have any noticeable effect. Furthermore, the simulation results show that it takes a long time, on the order of 40 years, to mitigate the psychiatric consequences of a war. Policy and financial implications of the findings are discussed.
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    Effects of Government Spending on Research Workforce Development: Evidence from Biomedical Postdoctoral Researchers
    Hur, Hyungjo; Ghaffarzadegan, Navid; Hawley, Joshua D. (PLOS, 2015-05-01)
    We examine effects of government spending on postdoctoral researchers’ (postdocs) productivity in biomedical sciences, the largest population of postdocs in the US. We analyze changes in the productivity of postdocs before and after the US government’s 1997 decision to increase NIH funding. In the first round of analysis, we find that more government spending has resulted in longer postdoc careers. We see no significant changes in researchers’ productivity in terms of publication and conference presentations. However, when the population is segmented by citizenship, we find that the effects are heterogeneous; US citizens stay longer in postdoc positions with no change in publications and, in contrast, international permanent residents (green card holders) produce more conference papers and publications without significant changes in postdoc duration. Possible explanations and policy implications of the analysis are discussed.
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    Recent trends in the U.S. Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (BSSR) workforce
    Hur, Hyungjo; Andalib, Maryam A.; Maurer, Julie A.; Hawley, Joshua D.; Ghaffarzadegan, Navid (PLOS, 2017-02-06)
    While behavioral and social sciences occupations comprise one of the largest portions of the "STEM" workforce, most studies of diversity in STEM overlook this population, focusing instead on fields such as biomedical or physical sciences. This study evaluates major demographic trends and productivity in the behavioral and social sciences research (BSSR) workforce in the United States during the past decade. Our analysis shows that the demographic trends for different BSSR fields vary. In terms of gender balance, there is no single trend across all BSSR fields; rather, the problems are field-specific, and disciplines such as economics and political science continue to have more men than women. We also show that all BSSR fields suffer from a lack of racial and ethnic diversity. The BSSR workforce is, in fact, less representative of racial and ethnic minorities than are biomedical sciences or engineering. Moreover, in many BSSR subfields, minorities are less likely to receive funding. We point to various funding distribution patterns across different demographic groups of BSSR scientists, and discuss several policy implications.