Research

College of Architecture and Urban Studies

• Jim Bohland (Global Forum on Urban & Regional Resilience)
• Jennifer Lawrence (Global Forum on Urban & Regional Resilience)
• CL Bohannon (Landscape Architecture Program/School of Architecture & Design)
• Rachel Weaver (School of Visual Arts)

College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences

• Katrina Powell (English/Center for Rhetoric in Society) *
• Katherine Randall (English/Center for Rhetoric in Society)
• Ren Harman, (English/VT Stories)
• Brett Shadle (History)
• Laura McCarter (Political Science)
• Tarryn Abrahams (Science, Technology and Society)
• Rebecca Hester (Science, Technology and Society)

Other

• Jon Catherwood-Ginn (Moss Arts Center)
• Khaled Hassouna (Office of International Research, Education & Development)

* Team Leader

Abstract

Although “big data” and data analytics have gained increasing importance in improving public policy, narratives, stories and face-to-face learning also can be critical elements of policy formation at the urban and community scale. This project seeks to understand community integration and policy implications through community stories for persons seeking refuge. Researchers will collaborate with local refugee organizations in southwest Virginia to provide educational and community building activities. The overall project has four phases: 1) training undergraduates in oral history methodology; 2) planning and implementing community activities and undergraduate research; 3) conducting data analysis and developing policy briefs and assessments for partners organizations as well as developing strategies to improve the integration of oral histories and public art into the formal policy process; and 4) drafting an external funding proposal. Specific planning objectives include establishing an Undergraduate Summer Research Program through Virginia Tech (VT) Stories and developing a proposal for external funding to extend the project. Students in the Summer Research Program will collect, analyze and communicate oral and written histories of displaced persons in the New River Valley of southwest Virginia for the purpose of policy interventions. In addition, project faculty will identify external funding opportunities to support a proposal that draws together elements from oral histories, displaced populations and urban policy change.

College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences

• John Tedesco (Communication)

College of Natural Resources and Environment

• Marc J. Stern (Forest Resources & Environmental Conservation) *
• R. Bruce Hull (Forest Resources & Environmental Conservation)

College of Science

• Danny Axsom (Psychology)

* Team Leader

Abstract

The worsening paralysis and polarization of political discourse demands a response from institutions of research and higher education. The goal of this project is to build capacity to help improve civil discourse around heated public policy issues. We will conduct experimental research to engage people in open‐minded processing of environmental messaging. Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt, 2012) and Self‐Affirmation Theory (Cohen & Sherman, 2014) hold tremendous potential that has yet to be tested in combination in the policy arena. We have developed specific interventions based on both theories together that we hypothesize will enable stakeholders to process information in a more open‐minded and less biased manner. We will implement an online survey that will expose people along the entire political spectrum to different combinations of our interventions and assess how participants process subsequent messages about environmental policy. The results may reveal specific techniques that enable people to more calmly and rationally process counter‐attitudinal messages that would normally provoke a hostile or defensive response (known as identity‐protective reasoning), which precludes the opportunity for productive learning and deliberation on the merits of the arguments. The research program could ultimately extend to implications for civil discourse training in diverse educational settings. Project outcomes will include completed analysis of our first survey experiment, design and implementation of the survey with the broad spectrum of Americans and a draft manuscript describing study findings.

College of Science

• Adam Dominiak (Economics)
• Sudipta Sarangi (Economics)

College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences

• Michael Moehler (Philosophy)
• Thomas Rowe (Philosophy) *

* Team Leader

Abstract

Policy makers are often called upon to make significant decisions regarding issues like health care and national security under severe uncertainty about how their decisions will affect specific members of society and society as a whole. This research project will empirically investigate how individuals and collective agents, such as policy makers, make ethical decisions under conditions of ambiguity. In the context of policy-making, ambiguity refers to the situation in which decision-makers do not know the probabilities associated with potential policy outcomes. The interdisciplinary research team combines expertise in economic methodology, decision-making under uncertainty and behavioral economics with ethical theory and rational choice theory. Researchers will conduct an experiment in the Virginia Tech Economics Laboratory to establish how individuals act in scenarios where there is a lack of probabilistic information as well as how they react to the fairness of different alternatives. Outcomes of the planning grant will include completion of the experiment, drafting a paper outlining the methods, results and impact of the experiment and developing transdisciplinary research expertise related to public policy. 

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

• Susan Chen (Agricultural & Applied Economics)

College of Architecture and Urban Studies

• Max Stephenson (School of Public & International Affairs)

College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences

• Nancy Brossoie (Center for Gerontology)
• Eunju Hwang (Apparel, Housing & Resource Management) *

* Team Leader

Abstract

The World Health Organization’s Age Friendly Initiative’s (AFI) age-friendly communities are committed to developing the core infrastructure needed to support physical, social, and economic environments that promote quality of life. Over 500 communities worldwide, including 194 U.S. cities have adopted the AFI because the numbers of older adults in their populations are rapidly rising. Preliminary efforts towards policy transformation and developing strategies for change have occurred in large urban areas but are not aligned with the needs and infrastructure found in rural American communities. The goals of this project are to develop a process for evaluating a rural community’s readiness to engage in the AFI and identify tools to measure health outcomes in rural communities. We will build research capacity to address the policy and health impacts of the AFI in rural Virginia. Building on the synergetic strengths of our transdisciplinary research team, we will conduct user-driven research, linking community policy and practice with residents and supporting older adults’ ability to remain in their own communities. Outcomes of the project will be the development of two brown bag seminars for the Virginia Tech community and an assessment matrix for AFI communities.

College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences

• Policy Fellow: Jennifer Lawrence, Political Science

College of Architecture and Urban Studies

• Mentor: C.L. Bohannon, Landscape Architecture Program, School of Architecture & Design

College of Science

• Policy Fellow: Melinda Miller, Economics

External Mentor

• Mentor: Matt Gregg, Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve

College of Natural Resources and Environment

• Policy Fellow: Stella Z. Schons do Valle, Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation
• Mentor: Eric Wiseman, Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation

Abstract

As the international environmental and development community broadens the focus of discussion from conservation of natural resources to their restoration, various initiatives have recently flourished worldwide, including targets to plant a trillion trees. Tree canopy cover in urban areas can provide as many benefits to society as forest trees, especially as the world population becomes increasingly more urbanized. The distribution of these benefits has been shown to be closely correlated with income and social groups, a problem that is not only related to access to neighborhoods with greater tree cover (which are usually more expensive to live in) but also to a resistance from lower income households to accept tree planting opportunities. The goal of this research is to better understand the incentives driving the decision to plant or not plant trees in urban settings by low-income families. Additionally, we aim to also understand how the incentives to plant trees by these groups are affected by potential urban forestry policy interventions, such as payments for ecosystem services. The lack of true community involvement has been shown to be an important factor contributing to resistance to tree planting in low-income urban areas. Thus, we propose a framed field experiment whereby we would undertake focus groups meetings with representatives from low-income households located along the corridor between Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD and test their decision to plant trees (or accept that trees are planted) in public rights-of-way under different policy situations. Each focus group meeting will be structured in two stages. In the first stage, participants will respond to a brief survey to gather household-level socioeconomic information and perceptions of the opportunities and challenges related to tree planting in their neighborhood. In the second stage, participants will be exposed to a series of scenarios in which they will state what they would do (plant trees or not) in "what if" situations. These situations will be related to fictional policies, on their own and then interacted with exogenous factors, such as climate change or a public health problem. Framed field experiments are a useful methodology in informing public policy as it allows the investigation of responses to potential policies and their interaction with factors composing the context in which the policies could be implemented as well as the comparison of effectiveness among different treatments.

Note: This team received funding in 2018 and 2019.

College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences

• Policy Fellow: Nicholas Goedert (Political Science)

Pamplin College of Business

• Team Founder & Co-Leader: Laurel Travis (Business Information Technology)

College of Natural Resources and Environment

• Team Co-Leader: Peter Sforza (Center for Geospatial Information Technology)
• Matthew Pierson (Center for Geospatial Information Technology)

College of Engineering

• Robert Hildebrand (Industrial Systems and Engineering)
  
  

Abstract

The redistricting of state legislative seats and seats in the U.S. House of Representatives is required every ten years following the national census. Partisan gerrymandering, or the deliberate drawing of district lines to favor one party, has been a controversial practice in the United States since its inception, but has recently received heightened attention due to exceptionally effective gerrymanders by Republicans following the 2010 census and a series of court cases addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018. These cases and the subsequent court decisions propose many competing and sometimes conflicting metrics for the evaluation of bias in maps, with no definitive resolution on a single preferred legal or empirical standard. Racial gerrymandering, the drawing of districts to exclude or facilitate the representation of racial or ethnic minorities, has also been the subject of a great deal of litigation under the Voting Rights Act since the 1980s. All congressional and legislative districts across the country will be redrawn following the next national census in 2020. A handful of applications exist for the drawing of district maps, but these fall short in terms of their accessibility to the public and their flexibility and power to incorporate the multitude of metrics involved. The primary goal of the RAVT team is the development of an open-source redistricting application that will be available to the public on a web-based platform. The policy fellow will contribute expertise in gerrymandering litigation, legislative procedure, and scholarship on the impact of gerrymandering. The innovations in this application will involve the evaluation of maps under an array of legal, electoral, and demographic metrics developed based on the expertise of Virginia Tech Political Science faculty, and the machine-assisted aiding of drawing maps to fit incomplete user specifications based on algorithms created by Virginia Tech Engineering and Center for Geospatial Information Technology faculty. The application will aid in the policy objective of drawing fair and representative legislative districts by allowing users to specify broad but incomplete policy objectives and assisting them in creating maps optimized to those objectives. Additionally, the application will allow users to easily evaluate competing maps based on user-defined goals and specifications and investigate how changes to existing maps will alter the substance of their representation.  In addition to this primary project, the policy fellow will also lead the coordination of a monthly seminar series for the 2019-2020 academic year and a mini-conference on redistricting at Virginia Tech.

College of Architecture and Urban Studies

• Policy Fellow: Margaret Cowell (Urban Affairs & Planning)

Office of Economic Development

• John Provo
• Scott Tate
• Albert Alwang

Cooperative Extension

• Conaway Haskins (Economic Development)
  

Abstract

During the spring of 2017, core staff and faculty from Virginia Tech’s Office of Economic Development (OED), Cooperative Extension, and the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) launched an interdisciplinary initiative called Vibrant Virginia. The ongoing initiative includes coordinated applied research, technical, and policy assistance projects, opportunities for experiential learning and engaged scholarship, and high-profile regional engagement activities. Vibrant Virginia engages and supports university faculty and external stakeholders in exploring urban and rural Virginia, looking at connections and disconnects, documenting similarities and differences, all with an eye to highlighting opportunities for community stakeholders from all sectors (government, education, industry, non-profit) to address regional challenges. Phase 1 of the initiative includes regional showcases, campus conversations, and seed funding. As the research team enters the second phase of the Vibrant Virginia initiative, the Phase 1 elements will be used to leverage ongoing conversations, establish new connections, and reach other geographies across the Commonwealth. The policy fellow for this project will translate the interdisciplinary work that comes out of Vibrant Virginia into a format and language that can be useful to external stakeholders and policymakers. The bulk of the policy fellow’s time will be dedicated to engaging with the ideas being presented in the regional showcases and campus conversations, soliciting written contributions for an edited book that will reflect the work of Vibrant Virginia, and assisting in the translation of results from projects that received seed funding. The policy fellow will lead these efforts with planned deliverables including a combination of journal articles, Op-Eds, policy reports to state and local governments, web-based products, and an edited book manuscript. In addition to integrating findings from seed projects, the campus conversations and regional showcases, the edited book will also solicit contributions from other Virginia colleges, universities, or related institutions engaged in similar types of scholarship. Potential audiences for this work include economic and community development stakeholders at the state and local levels, public officials with the capacity to shape economic and community development outcomes across the Commonwealth, and members of the general public who have concerns about their communities. All contributions shall examine geographic divisions in Virginia in order to uncover opportunities, challenges, and interdependencies. Collectively, the book will work to propose a series of synergistic policy interventions to move Virginia forward.

College of Science

• Policy Fellow: Sue Ge (Economics)

College of Engineering

• Divya Srinivasan (Industrial Systems Engineering)
• Nathan Lau (Industrial Systems Engineering)
• Maury Nussbaum (Industrial Systems Engineering)
• Sunwook Kim (Industrial Systems Engineering)
• Alan Asbeck (Mechanical Engineering)
• Alexander Leonessa (Mechanical Engineering)
• Wallace Santos Lages (Computer Science)

External Partners

• Norah Dunbar (Communication, University of California Santa Barbara)
• Rupa Valdez (Public Health Sciences, University of Virginia)
• SARCOS Robotics
  
  

Abstract

New technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence are poised to reshape the future landscape of jobs and work. With the growing skills gap in manufacturing, one of the most critical needs limiting the viability and success of industrial operations is improving productivity while concurrently ensuring worker safety & wellbeing. Powered, full-body exoskeletons have the potential to augment human physical capacity, thereby increasing productivity and lowering injury risks, while also preserving human skill for operating in dynamic, unstructured environments. Exoskeletons also have the potential to equalize job opportunities, by allowing diverse populations to enter and stay employed in physically demanding jobs that are otherwise inaccessible. The research team will develop an intelligent cognitive assistant embodied on whole-body exoskeletons to augment human performance. This cognitive assistant will improve a user’s mental model of exoskeleton capabilities and increase situational awareness, thereby enabling users to formulate new work strategies only affordable by the newly extended physical capabilities. This research will substantially advance the knowledge and state-of-the-art in exoskeleton control, human-robot cooperation, human factors, and augmented reality systems. Project assessments of learning and adaptation across a diverse range of workers are key to making designs more inclusive and effective, and to elucidating the effects of exoskeleton technologies on workforce diversification. The policy fellow will actively engage in research associated with examining the relationship between advancing technology and productivity, jobs, human capital and skill development and policy. This research will generate the first empirical models of the effects of augmentation on worker productivity and well-being, industry profits, and the labor market in general. By understanding the ramifications of this new technology for workforce diversification and labor market outcomes, this research will facilitate technology design choices within the broader socioeconomic impact.

Project-related publication:

Ge, S., Zhou, Y. (2020). Robots, computers, and the gender wage gap. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 178, 194-222.

College of Agricultural and Life Sciences

• Jacob Barney (School of Plant and Environmental Sciences)
• David Haak (School of Plant and Environmental Sciences)
• Scott Salom (Entomology)
• Vasily Lakoba (School of Plant and Environmental Sciences)

College of Architecture and Urban Studies

• Policy Fellow: Todd Schenk (School of International and Public Affairs)

College of Science

• Bryan Brown, (Biological Sciences)
  

Abstract

Invasive species—i.e., exotic species introduced through intentional or accidental human action—represent a fundamental threat to our ecosystems, including our agricultural systems, forests, and many aquatic environments. Invasive species are now present on every continent, including Antarctica, and cause >$1 trillion USD in economic damage globally per annum. The near-ubiquity of invasive species across all ecosystems and their concomitant impacts mean that innumerable stakeholders—including private firms in many industries, government agencies at all levels, private landowners, advocacy organizations, and scientists—with a wide range of interests, motivations, and resources are directly or indirectly engaged in some aspect of biological invasions. The matter of how to “confront the crisis” is thus complex and filled with uncertainty. Making meaningful progress on complex issues with scientific, policy, and management dimensions, like those around invasive species, requires multi- stakeholder transdisciplinary efforts .This research team is taking a novel approach by investing in sustained, long-term engagement across the science- policy ‘divide’, advancing true interdisciplinarity. Our goal is to turn this into new, more informed, models of how invasive species management is conducted now and how it might be improved. The goal of this particular fellowship is to learn from others elsewhere around the country and world as we develop a more comprehensive set of (best) practices. It is our expectation that this will seed a network of people engaged in and interested in collaborating and sharing best practices on invasives management.

College of Agricultural and Life Sciences

• John Fike (School of Plant and Environmental Sciences)
• Ryan Stewart (Crop & Soil Environmental Sciences)

College of Architecture and Urban Studies

• Policy Fellow: Theo Lim (School of Public and International Affairs)

College of Engineering

• John Little (Civil and Environmental Engineering)

College of Natural Resources and Environment

• Quinn Thomas (Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation)

External Partners

• Morgan Rae Edwards, University of Maryland, School of Public Policy
• Sarah Fletcher, MIT, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Abstract

Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) is one of a handful of negative emissions technologies being considered to permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keep global warming temperatures within the 1.5 degree Celsius warming target recommended by the IPCC. The transition toward wide-scale production of lignocellulosic bioenergy crops required for BECCS, such as switchgrass, would result in a global transformation in rural landscapes and infrastructure, with major implications for water resources. While recent global-scale studies have examined the feasibility of BECCS-driven climate mitigation given water resource limitations, local impacts and governance issues remain weakly assessed. The goal of this project is to develop a range of policy scenarios and assess their effects on the extent of bioenergy crop cultivation and impacts on surface water quality and groundwater recharge. In order to design local co-management strategies for bioenergy crops and water, better understanding is needed of sensitivities of models that couple: 1) policy levers to farmer decisions to grow bioenergy crops, and 2) spatial scenarios of bioenergy crop production to water resource outcomes at local scales. Our proposed research addresses this gap through three activities to be carried out in the Chesapeake Bay (CB) watershed including 1) identifying policy levers that can be used to influence switchgrass cropping in southwest Virginia; 2) determining sensitivity of the local water-carbon-energy balance in the James River subwatershed to switchgrass production scenarios; and 3) determining sensitivity of nutrient loading associated with bioenergy crop transition in the Chesepeake Bay. These three activities are based on a conceptual framework that bridges dynamic environmental modeling and collaborative decision-making in agriculture.