Building Cross-Sectoral Partnerships

Highlighting Consensus-Driven Development of an Important New Standard

Balancing Competing Interests in Lighting Quality and Energy Use

February 2025

If you’ve bought a light bulb recently, you’ve likely encountered an overwhelming number of choices. This stems from two major trends: the growing demand for energy-efficient products and advancements in light emitting diodes (LEDs), which create more light per watt and offer a wider range of color-related qualities.

As LEDs started replacing incandescent bulbs in the 2000s, it became clear that a new evaluation standard was required to balance the competing goals of lighting quality and energy efficiency. The Illuminating Engineering Society‘s Color Committee—comprising experts in human perception, lighting research, interior design, energy engineering, and manufacturing—took on the challenge. By synthesizing research findings and existing methodologies, they developed TM-30, a standardized system for specifying and rating the color rendition of light sources.

In this webinar, Dr. Michael Royer (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and Dr. Kevin Houser (Oregon State University) discussed the committee’s challenges, the collaborative approaches that led to both the creation and widespread adoption of TM-30, and key lessons for other HIBAR projects—including the benefits of aligning a project’s leadership structure with its goals.

Key Takeaway Messages

Politics and opposition to change can be significant barriers to progress for a HIBAR project.

Contributions to HIBAR projects are often not valued as highly as they should be by university promotion and tenure processes.

A small group of highly vested and active collaborators often drives progress.

Early career team members can develop HIBAR leadership skills with the help of mentorship from experienced colleagues.

If a group has established trust and a sense of urgency, it can more efficiently make decisions and reach consensus.

Persistent effort is necessary to turn HIBAR research results into lasting impact.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

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Webinar Speakers

Michael Royer

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Dr. Michael Royer is a chief engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he leads the core lighting research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. He conducts experiments to help refine metrics and specification guidance, with the ultimate goals of advancing lighting quality to improve building occupants’ satisfaction and wellbeing while increasing the use of energy efficient lighting technologies. Michael is a Fellow of the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and serves on the IES Vision Science committee and the IES Color committee.

Kevin Houser

Oregon State University

Dr. Kevin Houser is a Professor in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, and he holds a joint appointment as Chief Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His work focuses on human perceptual and biological responses to light and applications of light within the built environment. Kevin is co-founder of Lyralux, Inc., a Fellow of the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and former editor-in-chief of LEUKOS, the IES journal.

Improving Safe Behaviors on the Roadways

Research and Education for Driving Safety

January 2025

The prevalence of motor vehicle crashes remains a significant problem, causing not only physical and emotional harm to victims and their families but also imposing significant costs on society as a whole. The Transportation Research and Education for Driving Safety (TREDS) Center at the University of California San Diego is addressing this problem, using a multidisciplinary approach to understand the human behaviors contributing to crashes, and designing and implementing interventions to improve safe driving and thereby prevent crashes.

The TREDS team brings cross-sectoral expertise in public health, medical engineering, law enforcement, and neuroscience to better understand how fatigue, distraction, impairment, and aging driver challenges contribute to motor vehicle accidents. They have developed multiple evidence-based curricula to promote safe driving behaviors, and their resulting “train the trainer” courses have been embraced across the U.S. by health professionals, law enforcement officers, safety educators, and community organizations.

In this webinar, Dr. Linda Hill, TREDS Director, and Retired California Highway Patrol Officer Jake Sanchez described the significant and ongoing collaboration between TREDS and the California Highway Patrol to develop and deliver curriculum across a variety of driving safety-related topics. They shared how the results of cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary research have been vital for understanding the many complex factors that relate to safe driving, and for determining how to deliver material in a way that drives positive behavior change.

Key Takeaway Messages

Mutual respect, shared goals, and diverse perspectives often lead to new and impactful outcomes.

Partnerships are most effective if you can find individuals who share your passion for solving a problem.

Cultivating support as senior leadership changes within your organization can help sustain long-term partnerships.

Complex societal problems need cross-sectoral teams to address them.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

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Webinar Speakers

Linda Hill

University of California San Diego

Linda Hill, MD, is a Distinguished Professor and Founding Faculty of the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health at UC San Diego. In her role as the Director of the Transportation Research and Education for Driving Safety Center (TREDS), she is engaged in prevention research and teaching.

Jake Sanchez

California Highway Patrol

Jake Sanchez recently retired as a Public Information Officer for the California Highway Patrol. As part of this role, he collaborated with the TREDS team as they developed and delivered courses to promote safe driving behaviors among commercial truck drivers, the general public, and older adults.

Understanding chemical exposure to improve community health

Detecting environmental contaminants within the Yurok Tribal Community

June 2024

Recent increases in adverse health conditions among Yurok Tribal members living on the Yurok reservation in northwestern California have intensified concern among tribal members that contaminants from nearby forestry and agriculture activities may be a causative factor.

Research collaborators from the Yurok Tribe Environmental Department and the University of California Davis launched a co-led project to better understand this exposure risk. In this study, the team uses silicone wristbands to collect data on personal chemical exposures of tribal members, in order to identify potential differences in the level and type of contaminant exposures by gender, location of residence, season, and life activities. It is anticipated that data on contaminant exposure from the wristbands may correlate with contaminant detections in soil and water, thus creating a more complete dataset on environmental contaminants and pathways of exposure.

In this webinar, project co-leaders Joe Hostler and Beth Rose Middleton described how this project was initiated, the steps that were taken to develop shared leadership, and how the new understanding generated by the work will inform policies and thereby reduce detrimental health impacts, for the benefit of current and future generations of tribal members.

Key Takeaway Messages

When long-term, trusted relationships are established, they often lead to new HIBAR projects.

It is important for academics to recognize that non-profit and community partners may need additional resources.

Universities can support HIBAR projects by recognizing that they require more time and flexibility.

By emphasizing aligned values, organizations can create a supportive environment for HIBAR projects.

Respectful approaches to data sovereignty are really important in HIBAR projects.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

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Webinar Speakers

Beth Rose Middleton

UC Davis

Beth Rose Middleton is a Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis. Her research centers on Native environmental policy and Native activism for site protection using conservation tools. Her broader research interests include environmental and climate justice, fire policy, intergenerational trauma and healing, Native land stewardship, rural environmental justice, Indigenous analysis of climate change, Afro-indigeneity, and qualitative GIS.

Joe Hostler

Yurok Tribe Environmental Department

Joe Hostler is an Environmental Scientist with the Yurok Tribe Environmental Department, located along the lower Klamath River in northwest California. He is a Traditional Cultural Practitioner and an Indigenous Scientist who utilizes Western Science with Traditional Ecological Knowledge to help protect the health of the people, plants, animals, and environment for the benefit of current and future generations.

Upcoming Webinar: In Pursuit of Water-Health Equity For Indigenous and Rural Communities

In Pursuit of Water-Health Equity For Indigenous and Rural Communities

Delivering Sustainable Solutions With Next Generation Partnerships and Ecosystems

May 2024

Rural communities face challenges of growing complexity which require increasing breadth and depth of skills, all in support of expanding community solutions. This requires innovators to adopt new strategies and internal capabilities.

Community Circle (formerly the Reseau Centre for Mobilizing Innovation) is a nonprofit center of excellence dedicated to the design and implementation of innovative solutions for drinking water quality and community health in Indigenous and rural communities. Community Circle’s problem-solving approach empowers communities to define success on their unique terms, while building grassroots trust and confidence in proposed solutions to drive projects from concept to execution and beyond.

In this webinar, Community Circle leaders Madjid Mohseni and Irving Leblanc described the practices required to upgrade partnering arrangements from basic research to full solution-oriented and end-to-end ecosystems. They shared insights about how a deep partnership between researchers and community members developed through an initial collaborative project to improve water quality, building a solid foundation from which a wide range of projects have been launched. Together, the Community Circle team has solved several long-standing boil water advisories in rural settings, redefining sustainability, the economics of drinking water, and community health along the way.

Key Takeaway Messages

Communities co-leading HIBAR projects need to share equally in the benefits of the project outcomes.

A culture change is needed for academic researchers to shift their focus to what society truly needs.

Communities participating in co-production through HIBAR projects take pride in the positive outcomes.

The time required to build trusted relationships is often not compatible with typical grant funding cycles.

Long-term funding commitments are often required to sustain the positive outcomes of community-based HIBAR projects.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

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Webinar Speakers

Madjid Mohseni

University of British Columbia

Madjid Mohseni is a professor of chemical, biological and environmental engineering at the University of British Columbia. An internationally renowned expert in drinking water quality and advanced water treatment processes, he is the the Scientific Director and co-founder of Community Circle.

Irving Leblanc

Community Circle

Irving Leblanc, P. Eng., is Former Director, Infrastructure at the Assembly of First Nations (AFN). He is the Chair of the Board and the Co-director of Community Circle and has been involved in its governance and evolution since 2008.

Building Sustained Research-Practice Partnerships

A targeted funding program enables research institutions to shift their policies and practices to value collaborative research

January 2023

Research-practice partnerships bring together experts from the research and practice communities to develop a joint research agenda to address pressing questions. However, despite its considerable benefits, collaborative work of this type is not always valued by universities and, as a result, policies and practices within universities can inadvertently create disincentives for faculty members to participate in research-practice partnerships.

In response to these obstacles, the William T. Grant Foundation established the Institutional Challenge Grant program, encouraging research institutions to remove barriers that inhibit collaborative work. In addition to supporting an existing institutional partnership to pursue a joint research agenda, these grants enable changes in institutional policy and practice to value research-practice partnerships and enhance the capacity of researchers and practitioners to together produce and use high-quality rigorous research results.

In this webinar, W. T. Grant Foundation Senior Program Officer Jenny Irons described how the Institutional Challenge Grant program supports universities in building sustained research-practice partnerships that will reduce inequality in youth outcomes. Grant recipient Alicia Sasser Modestino from Northeastern University described how the funding has enabled a lasting partnership with The City of Boston’s Department of Youth Engagement and Employment, and created a number of organizational change efforts within the university aimed at building a supportive infrastructure and changing what it means to be a “successful researcher” at the university.

While these grants are intended specifically to enable research-practice partnerships, the institutional changes they create will more broadly enable researchers to participate in HIBAR projects, as well as other forms of community-engaged research. We are delighted to share this inspirational funding initiative with the HIBAR Research Alliance community as part of our webinar series.

Key Takeaway Messages

Successful changes within academic departments can catalyze broader institutional change.

For a change effort to succeed, it is important to identify and act upon the levers for change.

Research teams may find it surprisingly challenging to convey what societal impact looks like for the problem they are addressing.

Many faculty members benefit greatly from ongoing coaching for building effective relationships with external partners.

Building and sustaining an effective research relationship takes a great deal of time.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

Watch key excerpts from the webinar

Webinar Speakers

Jenny Irons

William T. Grant Foundation

Jenny Irons is a Senior Program Officer at the William T. Grant Foundation, where she leads the Institutional Challenge Grant program and the major grants funding initiative to support research on reducing inequality among youth. She serves on the Foundation’s senior program team, which sets program directions, develops new initiatives, and reviews grants.

Alicia Sasser Modestino

Northeastern University

Alicia Sasser Modestino is an Associate Professor with appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Economics at Northeastern University, where she also serves as the Research Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy.

Permanent Carbon Removal

Creating sustainable solutions for permanent carbon removal at scale

November 2022

There is an urgent global effort to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in order to mitigate climate change. While many industries are striving to transition away from the fossil fuels-based energy sources that have generated this atmospheric carbon dioxide, it is widely understood that a full transition to renewable energy sources will take several decades, and in the meantime there will be an ongoing reliance on fossil fuels. As a result, parallel efforts to develop effective strategies for reducing atmospheric carbon emissions, by capturing and storing the carbon dioxide, are an essential part of the global climate change mitigation effort. The next decade is critical for scaling up and commercializing carbon removal technologies.

UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management (ICM), led by Professor Gaurav Sant, is tackling this challenge of creating and developing sustainable solutions for carbon removal, and demonstrating that they are effective at a scale that is globally relevant in a range of carbon-intensive industries, including power plants and cement and concrete manufacturers. The technologies they have developed ensure carbon removal that is both durable and permanent, locking away the carbon for thousands of years or more.

The work at ICM is an excellent example of HIBAR research: projects pursue new knowledge that is needed to develop solutions to an urgent and global problem, in deep partnership with experts in industry, government, and non-profit organizations. Webinar speakers Gaurav Sant and Thomas Traynor will describe how ICM approaches this HIBAR work, including the challenges of demonstrating technology scalability in a university laboratory environment and bridging skills gaps by integrating experienced industry professionals within the university-based team. With this approach, ICM has demonstrated that it can successfully navigate a field that is moving quickly and is likely to have near-term global impact.

Key Takeaway Messages

As a form of cross-sectoral partnership, universities can hire knowledgeable, experienced people from outside universities to co-lead HIBAR projects.

The university environment offers greater intellectual and funding flexibility for HIBAR projects than the industrial environment.

Balance in team composition is needed for HIBAR projects to be agile and pivot quickly.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

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Webinar Speakers

Gaurav Sant

Pritzker Professor of Sustainability
Director, UCLA Institute for Carbon Management

Thomas Traynor

Technical Lead, Technology Translation Team
UCLA Institute for Carbon Management

The Future of Genomic Medicine

Developing lipid nanoparticle delivery systems laid the groundwork for COVID-19 vaccines and the future of medicine

April 2022

Jointly presented by the HIBAR Research Alliance and the National Academy of Inventors.

During the record-breaking sprint to develop mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, developers faced a key challenge: they needed a drug delivery system that would enable the messenger RNA, or mRNA, to get into cells in the body. Fortunately, this was not the first time this challenge had been encountered, because the delivery of RNA or DNA to cells to prevent or treat disease at its genetic root cause has been under development for decades, and the success of the COVID-19 vaccine is the tip of the iceberg for genetic medicine.

This delivery solution uses lipid nanoparticles – microscopic bubbles of fat – to encase and protect the mRNA and enable it to be taken up by a cell and released inside to produce the desired immune response. Decades of research in lipid systems enabled the dramatic speed of the COVID-19 vaccine development, from concept to clinical trials within 3 months of sequencing the viral genome. The groundwork for lipid nanoparticle delivery systems was laid more than 40 years ago in the lab of Dr. Pieter Cullis at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Since then, he has played a founding role in a number of companies developing pharmaceutical solutions based on drug delivery research, including Inex Pharmaceuticals, Acuitas Therapeutics, and Precision Nanosystems.

Prior to a year or so ago, lipid nanoparticles were relatively unknown, despite the decades of effort by many researchers to demonstrate their value as drug delivery systems. As a result of the demonstrated success of the COVID-19 vaccine, lipid nanoparticle–RNA drugs are now poised to cause a revolution in medicine, because of their ability to deliver precision gene therapy drugs to treat a wide range of diseases, and to enable vaccines for many other infectious diseases.

Key Takeaway Messages

HIBAR research projects are often challenging in many ways, but they are immensely enjoyable and rewarding.

New approaches to graduate student training are needed to better address the challenges facing society.

There is growing support for public-private research partnerships tackling big challenges.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

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Webinar Speakers

Peter Cullis

Professor, University of British Columbia

James Taylor

CEO, Precision Nanosystem

Collaborators Dr. Pieter Cullis (Professor, University of British Columbia) and Dr. James Taylor (Co-founder and CEO, Precision Nanosystems) described the HIBAR research journey that led to the global vaccine success, the prospects for a revolution in genomic medicines, and some of the HIBAR research challenges they faced along the way.

The Impact of Direct Giving

Experimental evidence suggesting that unconditional cash transfers can be effective for reducing homelessness

November 2021

Homelessness is a growing social, economic, and health crisis. A research team based in Vancouver, Canada, is tackling this crisis through the New Leaf project, a HIBAR research project investigating whether unconditional cash transfers can empower people to move beyond homelessness. This innovative intervention has the potential to reduce homelessness through an agentic approach beyond the provision of emergency services such as shelters and meal programs. This project is a partnership between Foundations for Social Change, a charitable organization that develops evidence-based solutions to advance social change, and the University of British Columbia.

The New Leaf research team conducted the world’s first randomized controlled trial examining the impact of unconditional cash transfers on individuals experiencing homelessness. In this trial, they distributed a one-time unconditional cash transfer of $7,500 to each of 50 homeless individuals in Vancouver, with another group of 65 as controls. The results of the trial demonstrate that the cash transfers led to significant improvements in housing stability, food security, savings, employment, and cognitive function, with no increases in spending on temptation goods. Based on a cost-benefit analysis, the cash transfer produced $600 net savings per person per year via reduced social service use. The research findings suggest that unconditional cash transfers can be an effective solution to reduce homelessness. Preparations for an expanded trial in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada, are underway.

Webinar speakers Jiaying Zhao, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, and Alice Hopkins, Program Manager at Foundations for Social Change, described how the research partnership developed and how the team applied advances in behavioural sciences, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics to demonstrate that direct giving is an effective tool to quickly reintroduce stability into people’s lives.

Key Takeaway Messages

Co-leadership has been an essential component throughout the project.

Cross-sectoral diversity was powerfully important for conveying results to key audiences.

With good project design, academic rigor and practicality are compatible.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

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Webinar Speakers

Alice Hopkins

Program Manager
Foundations for Social

Jiaying Zhao

Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair
University of British Columbia

Rebuilding Civic Education

Educating for American Democracy embraced complexity and controversy to achieve unexpected consensus

October 2021

The constitutional democracy of the United States is in peril, and there is a widespread loss of confidence in government and civic order. Generations of students have not received the high quality education in history and civics that they need, and deserve, to prepare them for informed and engaged citizenship, and the time has come to rebuild civic education. Leaders of an inspiring and large-scale HIBAR research project, the Educating for American Democracy initiative, set out to tackle the challenge of developing a balanced, national-consensus framework and a proposed plan of action for civic and history education.

In this webinar, three key participants described their collective journey to work together, even through many disagreements, and across diverse and numerous stakeholders, toward a shared goal to fundamentally improve civics education in the United States. In part because of the process, the EAD team produced a robust framework that has gained overwhelming support from the K-12 civics and history communities, and well beyond.

Educating for American Democracy (EAD) is an unprecedented effort that convened a diverse group of scholars and educators to create a Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy. This required acquiring a deep, evidence-based understanding of key issues from many perspectives and creatively designing, developing, and evaluating new approaches. The roadmap provides guidance and an inquiry framework that states, local school districts, and educators can use to transform teaching of history and civics to meet the needs of a diverse 21st century K–12 student body. The work was supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education.

The webinar speakers described how the initiative brought together hundreds of ideologically, philosophically, and demographically diverse historians, political scientists, and educators. The project required multiple task forces and working groups, each one grappling with a key design challenge. Together, the collaborators learned to approach disagreement and controversy as an opportunity for learning rather than as a problem to be overcome and, in doing so, they achieved much greater consensus than they had anticipated. The creative tension that resulted from conflicting priorities and perspectives was productively harnessed, leading to energetic debate, new perspectives, and alternative approaches that would not otherwise have been developed. The presenters shared their experience and thoughts about how the lessons they learned may be applied to HIBAR research challenges in other fields.

Key Takeaway Messages

Complexity and controversy can lead to a strong consensus.

Strategies for maintaining functional conflict are essential for reaching a consensus.

Effective approaches are needed to communicate with different groups of stakeholders.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

Watch key excerpts from the webinar

Webinar Speakers

Paul Carrese

Founding Director
School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership
Arizona State University

Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg

Director, Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRLCE)
Tufts University

Tammy Waller

Director of K-12 Social Studies
and World Languages
Arizona Department of Education

Improving the National Flood Insurance Program

How psychology and economics can be brought together to inform and drive policy

June 2021

Dr. Howard Kunreuther, from the University of Pennsylvania, spoke about how psychology and economics can be brought together to help society better manage low-probability, high-consequence events related to technological and natural hazards. Our innate human biases make it difficult for us to assess the risk of unlikely events, and it is important to understand that while we cannot prevent these biases, it is both possible and necessary to develop and implement policies that manage the risks appropriately. Dr. Kunreuther’s work has required deep and long-term collaborations with a wide range of partners, including policy makers, insurance providers, and disaster management experts.

He described the specific example of how biases related to risk assessment lead people to decide against buying flood insurance, despite living in flood-prone areas. His work has shown that a behavioral risk audit can assist in designing a strategy to both encourage property owners to purchase insurance and to invest in cost-effective measures to protect themselves against future disaster losses. This work has informed new policies recently developed by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and currently under debate within the U.S. Congress.

Protection against disastrous flood losses is just one example of the importance of behavioral economics in informing and driving effective policies. The current coronavirus pandemic has intensely highlighted the destructive consequences of our inability to intuitively grasp the concepts of exponential growth, and we have the opportunity to learn from this pandemic experience to address the exponentially growing threat of climate change. Dr. Kunreuther briefly described how society’s response to exponential growth processes, whether or not we are able to recognize them, needs to be swift and aggressive, and co-led, use-inspired basic (HIBAR) research is at the center of this work.

Howard Kunreuther was co-director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author, with Robert Meyer, of The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton School Press, 2017).

Key Takeaway Messages

Take the time to learn what is truly of interest to potential research partners.

Anecdotes and stories can be powerful for motivating people in various ways.

Develop guiding principles and a broad framework for your work.

Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.

Watch the full webinar recording

Watch key excerpts from the webinar

Webinar Speaker

Dr. Howard Kunreuther

University of Pennsylvania