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Episode 49: UMBC Social Science Alumni in Government, Business, & Non-Profit Careers | Otter.ai

Episode 49: UMBC Social Science Alumni in Government, Business, & Non-Profit Careers

Amy Barnes34min

Dr. Ian Anson

00:04

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of you UMBC's social science community to you.

Dr. Ian Anson

00:41

One of the most interesting parts of being a professor is the conversations that I get to have with students. Our undergraduates here at UMBC are fantastically inquisitive. And they always ask me questions that change the way I think about long standing problems, issues in the scholarly literature, and even approaches to research. They always ask tough questions about the world and the social sciences, but perhaps the toughest question that I can ask them is really simple. So what are you planning to do after you graduate? Thankfully, the answer to this question is really easy for UMBC social science students, because our majors go o,n to a variety of fantastic careers in government, business, education, nonprofit organizations, and so many more realms. The scial sciences at UMBC prepares students to be critical analysts of human behavior, society and organizations. And it's no wonder that our thoughtful students are such good fits for jobs in Maryland, Washington, DC, and far, far beyond.

Dr. Ian Anson

01:38

On this special episode of Retrieving the Social Sciences, we will hear a rebroadcast of a recent panel hosted by the Center for Social Science Scholarship that highlights the fantastic careers of three recent UMBC social science graduates. All three of these students ended up earning PhDs in various social science fields at UMBC, and all use their applied research knowledge to do high impact work in their fields. Dr. Delta Merner recently graduated with a PhD in Geography and Environmental Systems from UMBC, and currently serves as Lead Scientist for the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Dr. Brent J. Gibbons earned his PhD in Public Policy at UMBC and is a research Public Health Analyst at RTI International, an independent nonprofit research institute dedicated to improving the human condition. Dr. Brittany Gay earned a PhD in Applied Developmental Psychology at UMBC, and now works as Associate Director of Implementation Science at the Research to Policy Collaboration, a nonpartisan group that works to strengthen the use of research and policy through action-oriented collaboration between legislative officials and researchers. As you might already imagine, I'm really delighted to bring you a rebroadcast of this wonderful event, which was held in conjunction with CS3's celebration of its first five years. The panel which was moderated by Dr. Felipe Filomeno, CS3's associate director, was a great way to highlight all the impact that CS3 has had in bringing the social science disciplines together at UMBC. Let's listen in to hear about our recent students and their ongoing successes in the social sciences.

Dr. Felipe Filomeno

03:22

So my first question is, please describe your organization you work for and your role in the organization.

Dr. Delta Merner

03:29

Yeah, wonderful. Well, thank you everyone, for being here. As we said, my name is Dr. Delta Merner. I work at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which I will call UCS. And UCS is a nonprofit. So we're a US based nonprofit. And we do work to put science into action to build a healthier, safer and more equitable society. So our organization was started back in 1969, by a number of grad students and professors at MIT, who were concerned with how science was influencing the war in Vietnam, this was kind of the peak of the war. And there was a lot of concern with government money going to fund science and military instead of looking at how science could be funded for environmental and social justice. So that was kind of the roots of the organization. It's grown in a lot of ways now. So we now have, I think, a little over a half a million members that are part of UCs and any scientist can be a part of it. We also have supporters. And we have about 25,000 scientists who are engaged, we have a network of scientists, that we help to get them more involved in how their science can influence action, through policy through litigation through other kind of how decisions are being made in society. We have a couple of different departments. So there's science and democracy. We have a group that works on nuclear weapons. We have food and agriculture department, we have energy and me of climate. And I personally work in the climate area of of UCS. So UCS started with climate, it's really focusing on climate impacts, which which makes a lot of sense, and then about sixty two years ago, they realized that, you know, climate policy wasn't moving forward. And a lot of that had to do with corporate influence that was preventing climate action from really happening. So they started a climate attribute, or sorry, a climate accountability group. And my job is nested within that climate accountability group. So I work with a handful of other scientists, but we also have organizers. We have communications folks, as well as expert matter individuals. I specifically run what is called the Science hub for climate litigation. And I'm the Lead Scientist there. And we do work to inform climate litigation. So seeing climate litigation as one tool in the toolbox for climate accountability, and understanding that now, social decisions are being made in the courts. And that's something in the latest IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change. Their report mentioned that climate litigation is starting to shape climate governance. And we want to make sure that those decisions are being shaped by robust and meaningful science. So that is a piece of it. And we'll talk a lot more about what that actually looks like in the science that I do within that.

Dr. Brent Gibbons

06:06

It's great to be here. So I graduated in 2013, with, as Dr. Felipe said, public policy degree and I've worked in both private university, and now I'm in a nonprofit. And so I'll describe, you know, my research and the nonprofit. But we'll also kind of describe my role. So I ended up focusing on early behavioral health policy. It was an interest that I developed early on, there was a lot of need for research in that area. And there were mentors at the School of Public Policy. And so I've kind of continued throughout my career to focus on this area. And the group that I now work at has a really strong department in behavioral health policy. And so that's what led me to work at RTI, the Research Triangle Institute or RTI International. It's a very large nonprofit. It was founded in 1959. So it was, I think, the first company in the Research Triangle area, which includes lots of other research organizations there and it's kind of the Duke and NC State and UNC area that triangle. Researchers for RtI are all over the world. It's an international organization, it has about 6000 staff, and this is across over 250 disciplines. So the research agenda of the nonprofit as a whole covers a wide array of of focus areas, and they produce basic science all the way to like Policy and Practice Research, implementation science. And so really the whole continuum. So my role I'm in the health practice area, it's the largest group at RTI. There's a lot of federal money for Health Research. And so we work in contracts. So federal contracts, most of my work is with domestic research. But we also have grants and foundation work. So I work with a future build trust that I'm directing a research project on. We have two NIH grants looking at the opioid and overdose crisis, and work with the CDC. So there's really a lot of flexibility being at a nonprofit institution that and solely focuses on research. I think one of the benefits of being at a group like RTI is it's looked at as an independent kind of nonpartisan research institute. And so we can provide research to, to really inform policy and practice from that nonpartisan lens. And so my role at RTI, I'm a Research Leader. I'm in the Health Economics program. But I'm a little bit of a an outsider in my program, because I have more of a focus on policy and health services research, but often using economics tools, but what you'll find in outfits like RTI or Nordic or Mathematica, these different research institutes is it's they're really multidisciplinary. So that's one of the things that I've really enjoyed is we'll have multidisciplinary teams, including economists, implementation scientists, epidemiologists, working together to solve problems. I'm also involved in getting funding. So that's part of the work as well, working on proposals and looking for requests for research. And finally, I'm involved in mentoring junior staff. So I'll end there, but I'm excited to talk more about my work. Thank you.

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