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KU researcher leading project to quantify care economy, make stats available in central location
LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas professor is leading a new project to collect data on the care economy to quantify the often underrecognized work of providing care for others — such as child care and elder care. Misty Heggeness, associate professor of public affairs & administration, plans to make the information available in a central location to help policymakers, researchers, nonprofits and others access this vital economic data.
KU community invited to grand opening celebration for newest KU Innovation Park facility
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas faculty, staff and students are invited to celebrate the opening of the newest KU Innovation Park facility from 4 to 6 p.m. April 20. Located at 2033 Becker Drive, the “Phase III expansion facility” encompasses 66,000 square feet of lab and office space and is situated adjacent to park’s main facility. Guests are asked to RSVP.
Three KU Engineering faculty recognized for early career research achievement
LAWRENCE — Three assistant professors from the University of Kansas School of Engineering have each received prestigious national awards granted to early-career faculty. Mohammad Alian and Justin Hutchison each received National Science Foundation Career Development (CAREER) awards. Cheng Huang received the Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Young Investigator Research Program award.
Event centers climate anxiety, frames emotional response as tool for action
LAWRENCE — Mental health and climate scholars will discuss approaches to addressing ecological grief and transforming emotions into a force for collaboration at a virtual event from the University of Kansas. Hosted by The Commons and the Institute for Policy & Social Research Center for Compassionate and Sustainable Communities, “Leveraging Emotions: Climate Change and the Power in Feeling” will take place at 7 p.m. April 19.
KU Law team wins Thurgood Marshall moot court competition
LAWRENCE – The University of Kansas School of Law’s moot court teams have concluded the season with another national title. Ally Monson and Amanda McElfresh, third-year law students, won the Federal Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Memorial Moot Court Competition in Washington, D.C., in late March.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
KU researcher leading project to quantify care economy, make stats available in central location
LAWRENCE — People might not often think of work done in the home as part of the larger economy. But a University of Kansas professor is leading a new project to collect data on the care economy to quantify the often underrecognized work of providing care for others and make the information available in a central location to help policymakers, researchers, nonprofits and others access this vital economic data.
“The Care Board” will gather existing statistics on the care economy and provide a dashboard for access to the data and produce new data on the work Americans do every day to provide care for their families and communities. The project is supported by a two-year, $762,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Misty Heggeness, associate professor of public affairs & administration and co-director of the Kansas Population Center in KU’s Institute for Policy & Social Research, is principal investigator for the project.
“We think of the care economy as all the economic activity involved in care for humans. That includes all institutions like day care, preschools, in-home care, nursing homes, janitorial work, nannies, housework and more,” Heggeness said. “All of the things that are economic activity designed around caring for humans.”
Traditionally, economic data compiled through government agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau and used by researchers has focused largely on activity outside the home, or “in the marketplace.” However, that overlooks countless hours of care work done by Americans — largely women, research has shown, both in the home and in the community and often done outside of the hours of traditional employment. Failing to consider such data or housing it in disparate locations fails to tell the full story of U.S. economic activity, Heggeness said.
The Care Board will gather existing economic data on the care economy from administrative sources such as programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), WIC, Medicare, Medicaid and others and house it at a website that also contains a dashboard to help users access data useful to their cause.
“There are disparate places for this type of data, but we hope to be a repository for such information,” Heggeness said. “We will also be developing our own statistics.”
The Care Board will be accessible to anyone, but project leaders envision it as being particularly helpful to policymakers, researchers, media that report on the economy and nonprofit organizations dedicated to community work who will be able to access more detailed and specific data on their communities.
“The Care Board has the potential to transform how policymakers think about the role of care work in the U.S. economy. Our national data do not consistently collect and report on care work, and care work is essential for a well-functioning society,” said Donna Ginther, Roy A. Roberts and Regents Distinguished Professor of Economics and director of KU’s Institute for Policy & Social Research. “IPSR is thrilled to support Professor Heggeness’ innovative and transformative work.”
Project leaders for the Care Board are creating an advisory board and plan to have the website live in year two of the project. They will then make presentations at workshops to alert government agencies, researchers and others to the website as they continue to add to and refine it.
The project will gather data and create statistics on care work throughout the nation and has the potential to be especially valuable in telling the story of care work in rural areas, which are often overlooked, Heggeness said. By gathering administrative data, the Care Board can help policymakers and researchers more fully understand issues like the wage gap, intergenerational poverty and how certain citizens shoulder a disproportionate load of care responsibilities.
For example, educational attainment is often looked to as a way to help address the wage gap. But that does not consider that, even if someone has acquired the education necessary to advance economically, they can be unable to do so if they are balancing care responsibilities such as child care, elder care or other tasks. Gathering such information and making it available can help policymakers craft better legislation to address issues such as the wage gap, researchers better understand where other problems might exist and agencies to address problems on a community level, Heggeness said.
“As a society, we’re bad at recognizing care activities as economic work,” Heggeness said. “One area that hasn’t been easily accessible to study and understand is unpaid care. So we’re going to look at how women and caregivers live their economic lives.”
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Contact: Joe Monaco, Office of Public Affairs, 785-864-7100, [email protected], @UnivOfKansas
KU community invited to grand opening celebration for newest KU Innovation Park facility
LAWRENCE — University of Kansas faculty, staff and students are invited to celebrate the opening of the newest KU Innovation Park facility from 4 to 6 p.m. April 20.
Located at 2033 Becker Drive, the “Phase III expansion facility” encompasses 66,000 square feet of lab and office space and is situated adjacent to park’s main facility.
The April 20 celebration event will be the first opportunity for the KU community to tour the building since its completion. KUIP hosted a ribbon-cutting event for the facility in August 2022, at which point the interior of the building was not yet finished.
The grand opening celebration is open to everyone in the community. Food and drink will be provided. Guests are kindly asked to RSVP.
KU Innovation Park is an economic development organization and business incubator that provides lab and office facilities to support innovation- and technology-focused companies and entrepreneurs. The organization comprises 64 companies totaling 600 jobs and nearly $40 million in payroll.
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Contact: Cody Howard, School of Engineering, 785-864-2936, [email protected], @kuengineering
Three KU Engineering faculty recognized for early career research achievement
LAWRENCE — Three assistant professors from the University of Kansas School of Engineering have each received prestigious national awards granted to early-career faculty whose research shows promise.
Mohammad Alian, assistant professor of electrical engineering & computer science, and Justin Hutchison, assistant professor of civil, environmental & architectural engineering, each received National Science Foundation Career Development (CAREER) awards. Cheng Huang, assistant professor of aerospace engineering, received the Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Young Investigator Research Program award.
“This type of early-career recognition demonstrates the excellence of our faculty and helps elevate the national profile of the KU School of Engineering and the university,” said Arvin Agah, dean of KU Engineering.
About the awardees:
Mohammad Alain
Mohammad Alian, assistant professor of electrical engineering & computer science, won a five-year, $533,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for his research rethinking the internal networking of data centers — work to reduce latency, cut power consumption and accelerate speeds, all by maximizing the capacities of computing hardware.
Alain works on what is known as a near-memory data center network. The goal is to create interchip optical interconnections that deliver data directly from top-of-rack switch ports to processor chips and memory units by following a single instruction. No longer needed would be the comparatively stifling combination of multilayered software stacks, complex network protocol processes, frequent data movements and ongoing device management common in current data centers.
The potential network architecture would be transformative, able to deliver remote memory access at faster than 500 nanoseconds more than 99.9% of the time, all while using 100 times less communication energy. And in a data-driven world where bandwidth requirements for data centers double every 12 or 15 months, finding efficiency is critical.
“Thanks to the advancement in CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) technology scaling, also known as Moore’s Law, we can build chips that are amazingly fast in processing the data — but if we cannot feed enough data to these chips, they are useless,” Alian said. “This award will enable us to re-architect the data center network, from the application down to the hardware layer, to deliver data between the extremely fast processing elements at speeds close to hardware limits.”
Alian plans to use award financing to provide training for K-12 teachers as well as for undergraduate and graduate students, with a focus on under-represented minority and first-generation students in rural Kansas. He expects such training to boost university enrollment in computing and to help address the shortage of information technology professionals across the state and nationwide.
Justin Hutchison
Justin Hutchison, assistant professor of civil, environmental & architectural engineering, won a five-year, $560,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for his research into microbes that can break up chemicals in soil and groundwater.
His research focuses on microorganisms that can break down emerging contaminants. While current research methods rely on culturing microorganisms — and only 5% of such microorganisms in a soil sample can even be cultured — Hutchison is working to broaden the field by examining the proteins of all such microorganisms directly, in the soil itself.
The issue is immense. According to the American Water Works Association, threats to drinking water posed by emerging contaminants could prompt $370 billion in system upgrades — all to treat pollutants that include some so toxic that the EPA issues health advisories for concentrations as low as 0.004 parts per trillion.
Hutchison wants to address this growing threat. By using the same approach used to advance disease-targeting abilities of pharmaceuticals, he aims to identify particularly enzymes that can degrade such chemical pollutants into harmless byproducts.
“This grant is an acknowledgment that biological processes play a vital role in protecting our drinking water supply and that alternatives to our current research methods are needed to advance research in this area,” Hutchison said. “It will play an important role in training the next generation of undergraduate and graduate students to advance sustainable solutions to protect and treat our drinking water.”
CAREER awards are considered among the NSF’s most prestigious, given to about 500 early-career faculty each year with the potential to serve as academic role models in both research and education. NSF expects recipients’ activities to build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.
Cheng Huang
Cheng Huang, assistant professor of aerospace engineering, received a three-year, $450,000 grant from the U.S. Air Force for his work using data-science techniques to understand and model combustion physics and to help improve combustion devices’ performance and safety.
Huang received the award through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Young Investigator Research Program. The program, known as YIP, supports early-career engineers and scientists who show “exceptional ability and promise” as they conduct basic research in science and engineering.
Huang’s research — “Generalizable Data-Driven Modeling Framework for Understanding and Modeling Turbulent Combustion” — involves energy, combustion and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Huang and his team use data and models to help boost the accuracy of combustion simulations for everything from traditional liquid rocket engines that launch satellites into space to scramjets that move hypersonic projectiles at more than five times the speed of sound.
The advanced modeling also can assist development of future propulsion systems such as rotating detonation engines, a promising alternative to traditional combustion. The grant is helping Huang’s years of work get even further off the ground.
“This award allows me and my team to leverage the novel techniques originated from data sciences to inform accurate computational models to describe turbulent combustion physics at conditions that cannot easily be assessed and significantly improves our understanding of these challenging physics,” he said.
Such innovative thinking aligns with the mission of the YIP, considered among the most prestigious research awards that new faculty members can receive. Huang is among 58 scientists and engineers from 44 research institutions and businesses in 22 states to win a YIP award this year.
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Contact: Emily Ryan, The Commons, 785-864-6293, [email protected], @TheCommonsKU
Event centers climate anxiety, frames emotional response as tool for action
LAWRENCE — Mental health and climate scholars will discuss approaches to addressing ecological grief and transforming emotions into a force for collaboration at a virtual event at the University of Kansas. Hosted by The Commons and the Institute for Policy & Social Research Center for Compassionate and Sustainable Communities, this event is designed for intergenerational audiences and, in particular, those confronting difficulties coping with the effects and projected impacts of climate change.
“Leveraging Emotions: Climate Change and the Power in Feeling” will take place at 7 p.m. April 19. To register, visit https://bit.ly/ClimateEmotions.
The event will feature scholars who have studied and developed tools for responding to the challenges of climate change — whether in response to disaster and infrastructure failings or in examining the ways that mental health across generations is affected by threats of climate change. Joonmo Kang, KU assistant professor of social welfare, will join Susan Clayton, Whitmore-Williams Professor of Psychology at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, and researcher/author Britt Wray, who is leading an initiative on climate change and mental health at Stanford University, for a discussion moderated by Melinda Lewis, associate director of the Center for Community Engagement & Collaboration in the School of Social Welfare.
“We know that denying the emotional impact of current and looming climate crises not only negatively affects our mental health today, but also forestalls committed and collective action to meet the challenges of tomorrow,” Lewis said. “These scholars’ work reveals how our emotions are affected by anxiety and grief about our changing climate and illuminates how emotions can help us respond to the origins of our distress.”
In higher education, climate anxiety has been a topic of study for many disciplines for about 20 years, as described by a recent Yale study. However, until Clayton developed one in 2020, a measure didn’t exist for how best to understand the severity or degree to which such anxiety was felt.
In 2022, Wray tackled the topic in her book “Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis,” a book that blends personal reckoning with generational impact and examines impact across cultures.
“This discussion embodies some of the primary goals of the work of The Commons,” said Emily Ryan, director of The Commons. “It brings together experiences and research from diverse ways of knowing in order to build community and offer ways to find individual and collective agency in responding to global challenges.”
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Contact: Emma Herrman, School of Law, [email protected], @kulawschool
KU Law team wins Thurgood Marshall moot court competition
LAWRENCE – The University of Kansas School of Law’s moot court teams have concluded the season with another national title. Ally Monson and Amanda McElfresh, third-year law students, won the Federal Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Memorial Moot Court Competition in Washington, D.C., in late March.
Preparation for the competition began in fall 2022, according to Elizabeth Cateforis, the winning duo’s coach and clinical professor of law.
“Over the course of this year, (Ally and Amanda) developed remarkable advocacy skills that wowed everyone who saw them argue in this competition,” Cateforis said. “I could not be more proud of them. I look forward to defending our title next year.”
The materials provided for this competition include a mock district court order and circuit court opinion. The teams prepare and submit written appellate briefs and argue against other teams from across the nation. Judges, practitioners or scholars evaluate the competitors.
In the final round, Monson and McElfresh argued against the defending champions from the University of Minnesota, a team that included the returning best final-round oralist. After the final round, the KU duo won the title and individual awards as well: Monson brought home the award for third best oralist in the preliminary rounds, and McElfresh brought home the award for the best oralist for the final round.
“Our success was a joint effort between us, our teammates, our coach and all the faculty and community members that took time out of their busy schedules to help us practice our oral arguments,” Monson and McElfresh said in a joint statement. “Without them, we would not have made it to the final round. We feel honored to have represented KU Law in this competition.”
This competition draws a close to another award-winning season.
“I know our 2L (second-year) students will aim to be repeat champs next year,” said Pam Keller, moot court director and clinical professor. “The law school is incredibly proud of all the Thurgood Marshall team members.”
This win is just one of many moot court competition successes. Other highlights from the remaining competitions of the year include:
1. Josh Sipp and Madeline Calcagno, third-year law students, participated in the Wechsler National Criminal Law Moot Court Competition in Buffalo, New York, March 31-April 1, where they competed through to the semifinals. Sipp received the award for third-best oralist.
2. Maddy Tannahill and Caleb Hanlon, third-year law students, participated in the Prince Evidence National Moot Court Competition at Brooklyn Law School in Brooklyn, New York, March 30-April 1, where they also competed through to the semifinals.
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