RESEARCH
I am a public policy and management researcher in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University. My research goal is to improve our understanding and approach to contemporary public policy and management challenges. I have focused on two policy areas: 1) Public health and welfare management and 2) environmental justice and policy.
The key to my research program is to understand the way I approach policy problems: I am less interested in the way to solve problems, and more interested in why we solve problems in the way we do and what alternatives we have. Because I see and understand the world as a suite of complex adaptive systems, I frequently ask questions about policy and managerial problems from a systems perspective. I am also interested in understanding and analyzing the different dimensions of a complex adaptive system from multiple perspectives. Taking advantage of advance in emerging data, techniques, and technology is critical in this effort.
Public Health and welfare Management
As a policy analyst, my five years of experience at the Ohio Department of Health has shaped my interest in public health and social welfare problems (2000-2005). Since I joined ASU, my early interest in supporting Ohio Medicaid and WIC decisions expanded to studying emerging infectious disease outbreaks, such as that of H1N1 in 2009. In collaboration with an epidemiologist, applied mathematician, and practitioners at the Arizona Department of Health Services, my work in this research area focused on understanding the way the Arizona public perceives the risk of the new disease and is prepared for it, as well as ways to support critical government decisions during the outbreak, such as school closures and health professional training, using computer simulations.
In Fall 2015, I was asked to join an interdisciplinary research team at Hanyang University in South Korea. For this opportunity, I proposed to examine the way in which inter-organizational emergency response networks formed and evolved during the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in Seoul in May-June 2015. In August 2018, the team was selected as the recipient of a ten million-dollar, seven-year grant from the Korea National Research Foundation. I am collaborating with other members of the university's engineering school who are developing a tool that helps us mine text-based media data to construct emergency response networks. Interdisciplinary research has been the vehicle through which I have explored and understood the value of systems thinking in addressing policy and management problems.
Environmental Justice and Policy
Environmental injustice as a research topic has intrigued me since I joined Arizona State University (ASU) in 2007. Over the course of a decade collaboration, my colleagues (Heather Campbell at the Claremont Graduate University and Adam Eckerd at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) and I have been successful in showing the utility of agent-based modeling approach for urban and environmental issues. In 2015, we wrote the book, Rethinking Environmental Justice in Sustainable Cities: Insights from Agent-Based Modeling. In this book, we showed how and why environmental injustice can be understood as an emergent phenomenon of dynamic urban systems. We have expanded our research, including brownfield remediation and urban gentrification from a complex adaptive systems perspective.
Since Fall 2017, I have led a separate research group on environmental justice and policy with two other colleagues (Elizabeth Corley and Joanna Lucio) in the ASU School of Public Affairs (SPA: https://sites.google.com/view/ejpi/home). This group has grown and now includes four faculty members in SPA, three doctorates who were placed in different U.S. institutions (Towson University, DePaul University, and University of Texas-Austin), multiple SPA doctoral students, and undergraduate students at ASU and Cornell University. My colleagues and I also have advised graduate and Barrett honors undergraduate students. This group received a $30,000 seed grant from the College of Public Service and Community Solutions in ASU in 2018-2020. Our first paper on conceptualizing the quality of urban parks was published in Environmental Justice (2019), and a follow-up study was published in Urban Forestry and Urban Greening. Our research group members are working on several projects on greenspaces and urban gentrification from an environmental justice perspective.