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Student Spotlight

One of the objectives of the 10-week Science to Policy Certificate Course is to help Ph.D. students across various disciplines cultivate a knowledge base and tangible skill set they can use to appropriately apply science, including their own, to public policy issues or transition into a policy career. To aid in this, the students work on various deliverables, such as bookmarks, op-eds, policy briefs, and pitches. Here we showcase some of the best works done by our previous cohort.

Policy pitches: A short presentation on what policy changes need to be brought about to tackle a particular issue. At the end of the course, all students present their policy solutions and are given feedback by policymakers. Some of the best ones even get bumped up to the Legislation for further review! Here we present some of the best policy pitches from the previous cohort.

Op-eds: The students write a one-pager about their opinions on issues close to their hearts. Op-eds can play a vital role in shaping policy decisions and be a possible way to connect the general public to the policymakers by giving them a chance to express their views.

Bookmarks: We present some of the catchy bookmarks made by our cohort. These bookmarks are intended to be a quick summary pitch of the research done, which you can hand out to people you meet in the elevator or stick on your car bumper!

Policy Pitches

Chris Cosma

Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology

CC

Esther Omaiye

Environmental Toxicology

EO

Sanika Nishandar

Mechanical Engineering

SN

Jessica Bradford

Anthropology

JB

Jean Claude Iradukunda

Environmental Sciences

JC

Op-eds

Dongwei Sun

Materials Science and Engineering

 

Fund to establish and expand services to support innovation and entrepreneurship activities

 

Dear editor: 

The public education system, universities, and institutes have played a significant and foundational role within innovation-based industries. They made great contributions in the development and commercialization of new technologies and processes that benefit the U.S. economy, including the prosperities of Silicon Valley, the biotech industry, and internet companies.

The focus of this article is to establish stronger ties with the innovation-based business community and to allow start-ups and other entrepreneurs to leverage university and institution resources to launch their businesses.

Taking California as example, the state’s dominance in many economic areas is based, in part, on the significant role small businesses, including start-ups, play in the state's $2.3 trillion economy. Research shows that net new job growth is strongest among businesses with less than 20 employees, and that small businesses have historically led the state's local and regional economies out of recessions.

However, the small size results in certain challenges in raising capital, meeting regulatory requirements, obtaining information on intellectual property rights, establishing key mentor relationships, gaining access to expensive high tech equipment, and marketing their goods and services.

It is very necessary to establish network of programs and services to assist business, including start-ups, address these challenges including access to quality training, one-on-one counseling, mentoring, marketing data, and other business development resources.

Sarah Bobardt

Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics

Dear Editorial Board, 

 

Title: Logic, Raw Data, and Shame Have Not Convinced Some Americans to Get Vaccinated. Maybe We Should Try Humor. 

 

As a graduate student in an immunology lab affiliated with the School of Medicine at UC Riverside, I am frustrated with low vaccination rates. Not just against Covid-19 but against all communicable diseases that we can be vaccinated against, such as serious and chronic diseases like Hepatitis B, highly preventable yet occasionally fatal diseases like seasonal influenza, and diseases that have been nearly eradicated thanks to vaccination campaigns such as measles. It is my job to understand the intricacies of the immune system and research novel targets for drug treatment and vaccine development, particularly to protect against hookworm infection, which still lacks an approved vaccine, but afflicts hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Still in many ways, the greatest barrier to fighting off these diseases in America is often not a lack of a vaccine but a lack of willingness on the part of our citizens to get vaccinated. To paraphrase the old adage, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t take horse dewormer to fight off Covid-19.  

 

So that leads us to perhaps the greatest challenge of our generation—how do we convince people to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated? We have tried to cajole, incentivize, and shame people to get vaccinated. Mandates have led to a significant increase in compliance. But vaccination rates would be better overall, misinformation would be spread less, and pushback against common sense public health initiatives would be reduced if more people wanted to get vaccinated. And here lies the rub, or rather, the jab: every time you talk to someone who disagrees with you, you have an opportunity to change hearts and change minds. Honest conversation with a good sense of humor will go a lot longer than fear mongering or shame. 

 

In the last ten years, I have been a tutor and then a teaching assistant, working with thousands of students, helping them understand the basic principles of writing and science. I have found that one of the most successful ways to keep students engaged is through light humor and even some bad jokes. One need not be a comedienne to command a crowd, but I propose that using wit and humor to engage our audience, whether it’s your extended family at your Thanksgiving dinner table arguing about politics or your classroom of first year college students. Only by being open and even a little humorous can we engage the attention of those who have been swayed by vaccine misinformation. 

 

Lilian Azer

Psychology

 

Does Physical Activity Lead to Increased Distractibility? – Yes, but Timing Matters  

 

The US Census Bureau estimates that by the year 2050 approximately 96 million adults over the  age of 65-years-old will be living in the United States. This estimate is almost double the number  of individuals over the age of 65-years-old living in the United States in the past year according  to the 2020 US Census (56 million). As aging is inevitably associated with declines in several  physical and mental functions (i.e., cognition) it may result in increased cost for societal care,  therefore creating challenges for the aging society. Specifically, older adults often experience a  reduction in physical function and strength, along with reductions in key cognitive processes, such as the ability to remember information over short or longer periods of time, quickly process  information, or focus on the task at hand and ignore surrounding distractors. While the reductions in physical and mental abilities in isolation can lead to declines in older adults’ ability  to function independently, the interaction between both can be detrimental for older adults.  Almost every action taken in our daily lives involves some sort of cognitive and physical  component, therefore, it is important to study how the interaction between physical and cognitive action can lead to impairments in cognitive function.  

The rapid growth of the aging population in the United States thus requires our understanding,  and providing older adults with educational opportunities, regarding the negative consequences  that may arise during everyday mundane tasks when engaging in a simultaneous physical and  cognitive action. For example, driving is a cognition-heavy task (focusing on staying in your lane  and ignoring a distracting billboard or sound) which involves a motor component (gripping the  steering wheel, shifting your foot from the gas to the break pedals, or looking over your  shoulders to switch lanes). Imagine yourself in this following scenario. You are driving in traffic attempting to merge onto a different lane while a car in the next lane over is merging onto your  desired lane. At the same time, the car in front of you slams on its breaks and you find yourself  gripping the steering wheel tighter as you move your foot to pump the breaks. In this scenario,  you are exerting greater physical force on the steering wheel, and a distracting sound, such as  another car honking its horn, can make it more difficult for you to ignore the urge to look over  look at the other car. The increased distractibility while exerting greater physical force on  steering wheel could lead to an accident. While this is true for all adults, older adults may be  more impacted by concurrent effortful physical exertion (tightly gripping the steering wheel) during a cognition-heavy task (driving) since older adults’ ability to focus on the task at hand and  ignore distractors declines as a part of normal aging. Older adults who live in areas with high  traffic congestion will benefit from learning about the impact of the physical component  involved in driving may have on the cognitive component involved in driving.  

Given that physical and cognitive action simultaneously take place in our day-to-day activities,  our lab studies the interaction between engaging in a physically effortful task and how it can  impact cognition. In our recent studies we found that younger and older adults are more  distracted by distracting information present during a concurrent physical and cognitive task.  Participants show worse memory accuracy and slower reaction time in our task when there are  distractors present, such as colorful billboard or sudden loud sound while driving, compared to  when no distractors were present. This pattern only occurred under high physical exertion, but  not under low physical exertion, demonstrating greater distractor interference when the physical  task requires greater physical exertion, such as gripping tighter on the steering wheel during  traffic. In older adults, as some cognitive functions decline as a process of normal aging, the  interaction between physical and cognitive action can be more detrimental. Therefore, older  adults may benefit from learning about the harmful effects a concurrent effortful physical task  may have on cognitive function.

 

Taha Enes Kurtulmus

 

The Ivory Tower Costs an Arm and a Leg—Open Access is the Answer

 

Science is our biggest tool in meeting the grand challenges of our day. Be it cybersecurity threats, future pandemics, or environmental degradation; even though science cannot do by itself, we have no comprehensive solution to such problems without it. Yet science, at least American science, is increasingly cash strapped. What do we do?

Federal investment in research and development (R&D) has declined in real dollars over the last few decades. Suggestions to merely allocate more federal funds to science might not be easily applicable, however, since the budget is and will be tight for quite some time. Long-term budgetary commitments offset federal revenues by at least two decades. Therefore, I suggest looking for ways to make scientific research fiscally more efficient while retaining or even increasing productivity.

Profiting From Science

The industries with the highest profit margins range from agricultural insurance to hedge funds. Hedge funds, representing the low end of the top ten industries with the highest profit margins, have a profit margin of 40%. Similarly, yet surprisingly, the largest for-profit science publisher, Elsevier, has a profit margin nearing 40%. Other large for-profit publishers have lower yet still very high profit margins as well. To top off their profitability, the five largest science publishers control more than 50% of the world market in terms of the number of papers published.

Therefore, research institutions are dependent on a few highly profitable companies for access to peer-reviewed research. The problem becomes apparent when examining costs. For example, Louisiana State University paid Elsevier $2 million for its comprehensive subscription package in 2019. By that time, the university’s library had an annual budget of $6 million for serials. Those costs were then exacerbated by high increases to subscription fees. A mere increase of 5% would amount to $300,000, which would have to come from other resources.

Any burden from for-profit science publishing can be reallocated as funds for research or, in the case of universities, funds for scientific infrastructure. However, it goes beyond direct costs. Most, if not all, university researchers peer-review papers for for-profit journals. Universities, then, have to buy access to papers that were published with the help of the free labor of their own researchers, who reallocate their time that could have gone to more research.

Furthermore, if federal or state agencies want to make scientific research open access, which they have already funded, they have to pay extra money to for-profit publishers. In other words, for-profit publishers take money for research already funded by agencies and peer-reviewed by academics with free labor. All these additional costs that go to high profit margin publishers could be reallocated towards more research—even without spending an extra dime.

What To Do?

There are steps that can achieve this by directly promoting open access and others that by potentially reducing the burden of for-profit publishing on research institutions. First, agencies can incentivize researchers to publish in open access journals by proposing to furnish their research grants with additional funds that would have otherwise gone to for-profit publishers. Since open access journals have lower costs to publish, the remaining amount would be a permanent addition of funds that directly go into research. Second, the National Science Foundation can (1) commission a study into how open access can be improved and (2) reach out to university associations to spur discussions on open access. 

Third, the subcommittees on antitrust in the House and the Senate can hold hearings on whether major for-profit publishers violate antitrust laws. Regardless of its results, these publishers might want to preempt any potential violations on their behalf by moderating their excessive costs. Finally, leadership by the President in promoting the nation’s R&D efforts and open access merely by rhetoric will help create a climate motivating other actors who are working towards open access.

 

Sahar Foruzan

Anthropology

 

Does environmental justice happen in California? 

There are many forms of environmental justice, but not all forms define justice in the  same way. Environmental justice is a social movement and an academic discipline that seeks to redress and prevent exposure to environmental hazards, such as chemical facilitates, landfills and other polluting industries, in communities of color and build spaces that foster an individual’s ability to live, work, play, and age in a safe environment (Checker 2005). Outside the  environmental justice movement, the idea that we, as a society, and our local, state, and federal representatives, should work to prevent daily exposure to environmental hazards in our physical  environments is, in general, an easy statement to which we can all agree upon. What is less  straightforward is how to do this, what exactly does it entail, and whose vision of environmental  health and justice are we to follow? 

The larger questions of exposure prevention, responsibility, and justice converge in the  Salton Sea. The Salton Sea is a saline inland lake in southern California that is in crisis and at  risk of ecological collapse. The mismanagement of the lake, allowance of polluting industries, and competition among rural and urban water users has left communities near the lake, who  already experience asthma rates higher than the state average, exposed to toxic algae blooms and hazardous dust storms (Piper 2015; Cantor and Knuth 2019). There is a pending and critical  question among the lake’s managers of how to restore the lake’s ecosystem and protect public  health. Most recently, the California Natural Resources Agency has implemented the Salton Sea  Management Program (CNRA 2021) which focuses on habitat reconstruction and dust  mitigation. To fulfil one of the tenants of environmental justice, which many activists have called on the state to do, this program hosts public workshops to hear community feedback on projects.  

Communities experiencing environmental injustices, like the communities near the Salton  Sea, have always been strong advocates for community safety and positive social change.  Environmental justice activism has been a process for communities marginalized by racial  segregation and exposed to noxious industries to improve their lives and neighborhoods.  However, what happens when the environmental justice process becomes institutionalized? Again, we need to ask a similar question to the one above, whose vision of environmental justice  is being followed?  

The workshops hosted by the state to include community members in restoration  planning invite residents to make timed two-minute public comments and because of the  COVID-19 pandemic, these workshops are done online through zoom. Since zoom allows the  host to control the settings that participants can use, participants can’t see or speak to each other  or use the chat feature and instead only view what the host allows. While these workshops fulfill  a requirement for the state to say it publicly engaged Salton Sea communities, the style of these  meetings and other forms of engagement do not make participants into meaningful partners.  Furthermore, the Salton Sea Management Program itself, as well as long-term planning for the  lake’s restoration do not provide direct benefits or protections to communities despite feedback on these missing pieces (Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability 2019; Johnston et al. 

2019). At present, projects focus on habitat reconstruction which will only have indirect benefits  for dust mitigation over time. It will already be almost five years since the Salton Sea  Management Program began and almost nineteen years since the state of California first knew a  solution was needed.  

What this one example points to is how environmental justice is forestalled when the  process becomes institutionalized. The Salton Sea’s restoration projects focus on rebuilding  habitat which in the meantime leaves communities to care for their own individual wellbeing.  The focus on habitat restoration is necessary but the benefits to community have been expressed  as through recreation activities, the eventual mitigation of some dust prone areas, and the  possibility of economic benefits through resource extraction (Cantor and Knuth 2019; CNRA 2021). Each of these are indirect benefits and regulate community safety to a proposed future based on an uncertain market. Despite the use of environmental justice rhetoric in public  meetings and an incorporation of an environmental justice agenda into public projects  specifically meant to address public health and create community safety, the types of projects and the allocation of care and risk avoidance to the level of the individual will not produce the  radical change necessary to prevent community exposure. Therefore, it is necessary to move  beyond a state centered environmental justice lens to one that is critical of state mitigation and  care practices. 

 

 

Bookmarks

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