Social Justice & Well-being

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.

Asking Different Questions

Providing students with tools to produce more inclusive, accurate, and ultimately impactful research results

October 2022

Asking Different Questions, a new graduate student training program developed at the University of California, Davis, is aimed at giving early career researchers a more solid foundation to do cross-sectoral research, by providing them with the intellectual tools they need to produce more inclusive, accurate, and ultimately impactful research results.

The program was inspired by decades of research that revealed how historical precedents, cultural norms, and systems of power continue to bias scientific research and technological innovation. Funded by a National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award, Asking Different Questions tackles an important challenge facing universities, namely that research across science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields takes place within a larger societal context that is often not reflected in the research questions that are explored. The program was developed to provide students with the training needed to recognize and address the real-world complexities within their research context.

Highly Integrative Basic and Responsive (HIBAR) research projects are co-led by people in academia and society who work in an equitable partnership and integrate the core goals of seeking new knowledge and addressing a problem in society. Shared goals and shared decision-making are essential components of these partnerships, and the diverse perspectives that partners bring to the project mean that, together, they make wiser decisions about the direction, participants, and activities within the project – from the start and throughout.

The Asking Different Questions curriculum equips researchers with skills needed to build trusted cross-sectoral partnerships, and the HIBAR Research Alliance is delighted to showcase the program as part of our 2022-2023 webinar series.

Key Takeaway Messages

Substantive and lasting change requires changing the overall system and culture.

It is vital for universities to make space for graduate students to pursue HIBAR research.

Universities, can, and should, support graduate students as change leaders.

Be more flexible about what defines an academic discipline.

Make space for insights from PhD committee members from outside the discipline.

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

Watch the full webinar recording

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Webinar Speaker

Dr. Sarah Rebolloso McCullough

Associate Director Feminist Research Institute University of California, Davis

Dr. Sarah Rebolloso McCullough, Associate Director of the Feminist Research Institute at the University of California, Davis, described how the Asking Different Questions program creates meaningful and respectful dialogue across boundaries that typically divide—between universities and communities, activists and researchers, scientists and humanists, workers and policymakers.

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.

Watch the full webinar recording

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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

Building a Durable HIBAR Infrastructure

Enabling a platform for HIBAR research projects designed for collaborative research, teaching and advocacy

October 2020

Dr. Fonna Forman, Director of the Center on Global Justice at the University of California San Diego, shared her experience in building a durable infrastructure for HIBAR projects, specifically focusing on developing the long-term partnerships that are essential for success.

Dr. Forman’s experience stems from work during the past decade to create the UCSD Community Stations, a network of field hubs located in disadvantaged neighborhoods on both sides of the San Diego-Tijuana border, designed for collaborative research, teaching and advocacy among university researchers, school districts, and community-based non-profit partners. She described how the community members and researchers have developed long-term relationships through which trust has built as a result of being a constant positive presence in each other’s lives. This established trust network has enabled a platform for HIBAR research projects focusing on key issues such as climate vulnerability, educational disparities, and health disparities. In addition to direct, tangible solutions to specific challenges, these projects have the potential to lead to policy changes that enact lasting positive change in the communities by building capacity for political and social advocacy.

The Center on Global Justice (CGJ) at UC San Diego was launched in 2012 to advance interdisciplinary research on poverty and global development, with an emphasis on collective action at community scale. The CGJ is home to initiatives focused on global ethics and cooperation (the conventional terrain of global justice), but the majority of the center’s initiatives localize the global, focusing on real-word intervention at local scale, in partnership with non-profits, government agencies, and civic stakeholders—top-down and bottom-up.

Key Takeaway Messages

Long-term partnerships are developed from relationship networks based on trust and mutual respect.

The conventional academic research model is ineffective for addressing many societal problems.

Research teams need a support infrastructure to manage the complexity associated with addressing societal problems.

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. Fonna Forman

UC San Deigo