Using Evidence to Reduce Racial Disparities in Bone Health, Improve Mental Health, and Support Self-Sufficiency

[KATIE ENGEL]

Overall, the benefit of participating in this program over the summer was really expanding the scope of how I was thinking about this question and what data sources I was thinking about using. So it really felt like a privilege to get to work with people from a number of different disciplines, you know, psychology, economics, people who are really, really strong at methods, because I got to leverage people from so many different backgrounds and disciplines rather than just my sort of niche policy area, and the world I come from and how I’ve been trained.

[J.B. WOGAN]

I’m J.B. Wogan from Mathematica, and welcome back to On the Evidence. Every year, early career scholars join Mathematica in the summer to work on independent research related to improving public wellbeing. The deadline to submit applications for this year’s Summer Fellowship Program is February 28th. And so, as people weigh whether to throw their hats in the ring, I spoke with Jenn Kirk, Katie Engel, and Adrienne Jones, who participated in last year’s Summer Fellowship Program.

Jenn is pursuing a Doctoral degree in Gerontology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Her research examines racial and ethnic disparities in the screening and treatment of osteoporosis. Katie is pursuing a Doctoral degree in Public Administration and Policy at American University. Her research explores the effects of federal nutrition assistance on mental health. And Adrienne is pursuing a joint Doctoral degree in Public Policy and Sociology at Duke University. Her research looks at how suspending people’s driver’s licenses may impede self-sufficiency.

During our interview, we spoke about their experiences working with Mathematica staff, the policy implications of their research, why they’re interested in applied research, and what they plant to do after defending their dissertations. A full transcript of the episode is available in our show notes and on a blog at Mathematica.org. I hope you find our conversation useful.

All right. So, I think, first of all, I’m really excited to talk to everyone today, and to hear a little bit more about your experiences with the Summer Fellowship, and your work in general. I wanted to start by asking about kind of the back story, the inspiration for getting into policy research. I wondered, is there someone whose work in policy research has inspired you. Jen, do you want to go first? Is there kind of a policy research hero who guides your work or inspires your work?

[JENN KIRK]

This is kind of a hard question for me, only because it wasn’t exactly a person. It was more of an organization. So, prior to grad school, I got to work as a policy research summer fellow for Unitas U.S., and they do some work with Hispanic and Latinos throughout the country. Specifically with them, I got to work on this project called La Porta d’Oro. It means the golden door. So it was an adult day center, so essentially if you have a loved one that is aging, that needs care during the day, there’s not very many ways to have that covers.

And so in thinking about organizations that are advocating for programs like this, or doing research on how to increase coverage and reduce health disparities, Unitas U.S. is definitely one of those, as well as, of course, Mathematica. So, it was hard to pick a specific person because there were so many, so I had to pick something. Unitas U.S. would be the one.

[J.B. WOGAN]

I didn’t intend to start with a hard-hitting question. But, yeah, that’s great. It doesn’t have to be a person. I think an organization works great too. Katie, what about you, is there someone or some organization who has inspired your work?

[KATIE ENGEL]

Yeah. I guess I first got into SNAP research through the summer AmeriCorps program when I was in college, where I worked at a farmer’s market in Rochester, New York, doing SNAP implementation at the market, essentially, so that residents would come and use their SNAP benefits at the market. So that’s really what got me interested in the food and nutrition research in particular.

And then I just sort of dived into the academic literature and became familiar with, you know, all the big names, Marianne Bitler, Hilary Hoynes, Diane Schanzenbach, and got really interested in how increasing household resources through staff not only affects nutrition but all these other outcomes that we care about, as well as family wellbeing. So, yeah, those are some of the researchers whose work I really admire and got me interested in the topic to begin with.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay, Katie, that’s perfect. So, Adrienne, now I want to turn to you. Is there a person or an organization who has inspired you to go down this path of policy research?

[ADRIENNE JONES]

Yeah, of course. So, I’m thinking most recently, Dr. Alexes Harris at the University of Washington. I really admire her. She’s a sociologist, kind of the same way that I’m training to be. I really appreciate how she uses kind of sociological tools to really examine some of these important and meaningful social problems. So, in particular, I’m been really excited to engage with her work around monetary sanctions, because it’s quite related to my dissertation work. I just think her work is really thoughtful, but it’s also been a great resource for me as I’ve been developing my dissertation project. So reading her book and some of her papers and some of the special issue journals that she’s been working on has been super informative for me.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. Not everyone might be familiar with the phrase “monetary sanctions.” It sounds like it’s financial penalties or having to pay money, but is there more to say than that?

[ADRIENNE JONES]

Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. So, it tends to be kind of signs and scenes to levy for a variety of sanctions, so everything from felony and misdemeanor offenses to minor traffic charges, the penalties or punishments of sorts in financial form that are often levied on folks.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. And the subject of the sentence, when we’re talking about blank, is conferring monetary sanctions on somebody else. It’s the government. It the government agencies. Is that usually the subject of the research?

[ADRIENNE JONES]

Yeah. So, typically, the criminal/legal system, so, for an example, like I was driving down Highway 85 and I was speeding and I was pulled over by a state trooper, and I received a ticket or a citation for speeding. But that citation also comes along with, like, a hundred-dollar fine that I have to pay to a local court system or jurisdiction or something like that.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. But it would be different from, say, like, a bank requiring, you’re late paying a bill, or is that another kind of monetary sanction?

[ADRIENNE JONES]

I mean, definitely is another type of monetary sanction. But those that I’m working on for my dissertation generally imposed in the criminal/legal system. There’s some type of infraction that folks have experienced.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. Great. Adrienne, mentioned that she has a book that was particularly influential. What was the name of that back.

[KATIE ENGEL]

Yeah, the book is called “A Pound of Flesh” I believe. And it’s just kind of broadly exploring this issue of monetary sanctions, and some of the different chapters from that book. Really spending a lot of time reading her work, just kind of preparing myself to even think about how my work might be useful or contribute to some of the literature.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. Great. So, we talked about who or which organization inspired you all to go down the path of policy research. The other question I had was, why applied research? There are things you can do in academia, really interesting questions you can investigate, but all three of you did the Summer Fellowship at an organization that is trying to generate evidence that can influence systems, policies, programs, practices, you know, change, decision-makers, improve people’s lives for the better. What was it about applied research that appealed to you? And, Katie, may we can start with you this time.

[KATIE ENGEL]

Sure. Yeah. I guess growing up, going way back, I always knew I kind of wanted to work on big social inequalities and those sorts of issue, and I kind of thought I wanted to do more like boots on the ground work, nonprofit or things like that, and then I realized that sort of my personality and interests were really suited to research because I’m an introvert and I love sort of the puzzle-solving nature of research, all the methods and the math. So I think doing the applied research sort of merged my interest with the methods, the math, the puzzles, and also this interest in social justice that I kind of always had.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Jen, what about you, what brought you down this path of applied research?

[JENN KIRK]

Similar in some ways to what Katie said about boots on the ground. So, when I think about applied research, I think about how it differs from the other kinds of research, and what my background is. So, I started out by working in organizations at, like, the bottom ground level, and often would see that sometimes when speaking to management and policies were coming out, the policies didn’t always fit how we were interacting with clients. So, specifically in this situation, it was children with, like, autism that I was working with. So there seemed to be a mismatch.

Initially, I thought I wanted to do clinical research or just clinical work. And that didn’t really allow me to kind of be this go-between person between the boots on the ground and the people who were higher up in making the policy. So, when I think about applied research in terms of health disparities and what my work with contribute to, it’s, hopefully, providing this, like, foundation of evidence that will help the policymakers make decisions that will actually create policies that are effective, rather than sometimes a little bit of a mismatch there. So that’s where I’m really inspired by this type of research.

[J.B. WOGAN]

All right. Adrienne, now, I think you’re a first in our podcast recordings about previous summer fellows, in the sense that you have actual little worked at Mathematica, before, you had a job here, before going to get your PhD, so you already had some experience in applied research. But, nonetheless, I’m interested, both, in terms of why you had a previous position here and also doing the Summer Fellowship now, what is it about applied research that you like?

[ADRIENNE JONES]

So, I’m a person who is really interested in the so-what questions. I think research is awesome, and I really enjoy created knowledge. But once we do gain this knowledge, I’m always thinking about, so, what does this mean? What do we do with this? And I think applied research really allows me to answer the so-what question. I mean, the so-what question is big; right? So there are a lot of different factors that go into what do we do with this. But I think my research is a part of starting to answer that sole question. So, with regard to my work on these fines and fees in particular, we are learning some things from this project about the way they affect individuals and how they shape people’s lived experiences here in the world.

So, my goal is to take this information and say, okay, so what then? Like, are fines and fees good for individuals? Are they good for society? If yes, or if no, how might we think about kind of transforming these systems in ways that allow them to be more productive and less punitive. So, I really like that kind of work; right? I really like partnering with local government agencies, community partners, even individuals in the communities to think about some of the policies and procedures that we have, and if they’re working and if they’re not, and how do we take that knowledge that we generated and move forward in some productive way.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. So we talked in more general terms about what inspired each of you to go into policy research, and what was it about applied research in particular that attracted you to this Summer Fellowship. I think now it would be worth getting a little bit more into the details about your respective summer fellowship projects and how they fit into the larger context of your research -- your dissertation. Katie, do you want to start us off?

[KATIE ENGEL]

Yeah. So my dissertation focuses broadly on socioeconomic disparities and wellbeing, and the role of SNAP, for those who aren’t familiar with the program, it’s essentially the modern-day version of food stamp program, on mitigating those disparities. And so while at Mathematica, I focused on a SNAP pandemic policy change that essentially made it easier for people to maintain their SNAP participant status. It made some of the administrative burden of the program was less.

And during the pandemic, this policy sort of turned off in states in a staggered fashion. So, basically, in this project, I exploit the turn off of that policy, where it then becomes harder to be a SNAP participant, and look at how that policy change affects participants’ mental health. So, essentially, it’s leveraging a recent pandemic policy change to see how anxiety/depression are related to SNAP participation.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. And then I’ll turn to you, Adrienne. Tell us a little bit more about your Summer Fellowship and how the work there fits into your dissertation work.

[ADRIENNE JONES]

So, my dissertation project is around driver’s license suspensions and how they structure opportunities for mobility. So this is a qualitative investigation. So, to kind of explore my research question, I collected interview data from individuals in North Carolina who were eligible for a local driver’s license restoration program.

As far as my time at Mathematica, I spent the summer kind of analyzing my transcript data, trying to make sense of, like, the lived experiences of these unlicensed folks that we’ve been talking to.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. Now, Jen, I want to turn to you. What was your Summer Fellowship about, and how does it fit into your dissertation?

[JENN KIRK]

Yeah, so, broadly, my dissertation is looking at racial and ethnic disparities in osteoporosis management in the United States. Osteoporosis, if you don’t know what it is, it’s a bone health disease that tends to be more common as individuals age. So, there’s a lot of fractures that are going to happen, so that means half of all women that are older women are going to experience a fracture. But even after fractures, they’re not experiencing treatment.

So, with knowing that not as many people experience treatment and the sources of disparities in care in this country being things like social and structural factors, discrimination, and sometimes even mistrust of health-care providers among racial and ethnic minorities, that’s where my work fit in with some of Mathematica’s work. So, while a fellow at Mathematica, I worked on the aim of my dissertation that is looking at providers and how providers’ decisions to treat or not treat may be influencing some of these racial and ethnic disparities in treatment.

So, I worked on a survey, developed it, came up with a sampling plan so it could be nationally representative so that, hopefully, at the end, this work will have the ability to have some policy implications on the provider level, the neighborhood level, and the individual level.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. Now I want to talk a little bit about the policy implications of your work. What should the policy-making community know about your research, and perhaps research findings, if you feel like you’re ready to share those? Katie, do you want to start us off?

[KATIE ENGEL]

Sure. Yeah, I can speak a little bit to those. The findings are still preliminary, but, essentially, I find no effect, no effect of SNAP implementation on mental health. And, you know, traditionally people think no effects are kind of boring. But I think, in this context, it’s really important to note that; right, because we know that SNAP is a really effective antipoverty tool, a food and security mitigation tool. It actually takes more people out of deep poverty than any other means-tested program. And during the pandemic specifically, we saw that SNAP was really effective in mitigating food insecurity and helping increase with household resources.

So, I think my research is sort of in conversation with some of these other research projects that took place, showing the effects through the pandemic, because it essentially shows that SNAP can achieve these aims without inducing some of the harmful things that you hear, political reasons tossed around for limiting expansion of the program, like loss of autonomy, sort of this welfare dependency, this stigma; right? So my research is basically in conversation with these other projects showing, hey, SNAP is a really effective social safety net tool, and we can’t see any evidence that it’s having this negative welfare stigmatization effect.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Do you think that that might influence a decision about making SNAP more widely available, or should it be reinforcing the status quo? I mean, what might that mean for a policymaker who is trying to decide whether to make changes to the SNAP program?

[KATIE ENGEL]

Yeah, I think sort of another stream of literature that this project touches on is this whole administrative burden literature; right? So, we know, for instance, that a lot of these social safety net programs are really hard to obtain and maintain your location in, because there’s a lot of hoops you need to jump through, and it’s sort of a hassle, and there’s a lot of different procedural barriers in gaining and maintaining the location.

And because SNAP is administered at the state level, we see a lot of variation between states about the level of burdens that they face when they participate in this program. So, I think this research is also sort of contributing to that discussion. I’m not sort of competent yet enough in my findings to say which way. But I think it’s an important addition to the conversation of, hey, we look at SNAP and owner SNAP policy change, and we found that turning it off or turning it on doesn’t really seem to have an effect on mental health, at least in this context. So, I think in policymakers thinking about how we want to administer SNAP and implement at it at the state level is an important thing to can.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. And, Adrienne, what about you, what are the policy implications of your research on the D.A.R.E. program?

[ADRIENNE JONES]

So, the two main policy implications that come to mind for my work, first, you know, from the individuals that we’ve been talking to, it’s quite clear that these policies kind of try to punish driving behaviors have a number of collateral consequences that are really meaning for individuals’ lives. For this dissertation in particular, we’re findings that there are a lot of implications around self-sufficiency. So, for example, many of our participants can detail experiences with career immobility and debt accumulation in particular, so folks are finding difficulty accessing certain types of jobs, or perhaps jobs that pay a living wage or a wage that would allow them to comfortably care for them and their families.

And then, oftentimes, the license suspension piece comes with a fine or a fee that sometimes folks aren’t able to pay, and because they’re still living and still driving with a suspended license, it results in this kind of pattern of an accumulation of traffic tickets, which, in turn, is an accumulation of fines and fees. And we see some folks collecting debt that they are just, unfortunately, unable to escape from, and that debt sometimes can linger for years on end, so we’re really learning some of that information from our folks. And I think we’re also seeing that these experiences aren’t concentrated just in the lives of unlicensed individuals, but they also have ramifications for the folks who are closest to them, their families, their friends, and, also, other folks in their networks as well.

I think the other really important policy implication of this work is that this gives us another lens through which we might think about racial inequalities or racial disparities, particularly with economic inequality. So, if we're thinking about literature that talks to us about how sometimes black and brown communities can experience higher rates of policing, they might experience higher rates of traffic stops, and sometimes those traffic stops result in a ticket or citation or some type of monetary sanction.

And, also, some of the literature that talks about kind of the existing disparities and income and inequality already, if we then think about how some of those folks may be involved in the system of traffic infractions, we can see another way in which minoritized folks who might already be experiencing some of these disparities, you know, that disparity may be further exacerbated; right? Traffic tickets are one of those things that we tend to think of as kind of innocuous. They’re annoying. Nobody likes them, but they don’t mean that much. We’re actually finding through our research that that’s not true, particularly for folks with low income for whom these fines and fees may be a significant barrier to getting that license back.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Jen, let’s turn to you now. Let’s talk about the policy context and policy implications of your research on bone health.

[JENN KIRK]

So, there’s two specific areas. The first area is bills in House and Senate, and then the second area is looking at United States Preventative Service Task Force recommendations for us to process. So, in talking about bills in the House and Senate, since 1970s, approximately, like, 30 bills that are focused on creating the screening, treatment, diagnostic rates of osteoporosis among older adults have been introduced, and none of them have really passed.

The only measure that actually passed into law was creating a, like, National Osteoporosis Awareness Day. So, that’s one area that, if we’re talking about health disparities, this is a very topical area that, hopefully, it will create more momentum for those kinds of bills that are introduced. Currently, there is the Bone Health Act, which is in the House and the Senate, so maybe there will be some forward action there.

And then the second area is the United States Preventative Service Task Force recommendations. Currently, they rate the screening and treatment measures, as well as using medications after a fracture occurs, which is what results from osteoporosis, they rate them very low. So, they say that there is not enough evidence. And then the recommendations that they provide for clinicians when to screen and treat don’t include things like social and structural determinants of bone health, which we’re seeing, I think, that are increasing people’s risk, yet, the guidance doesn’t even include these information or talk about how those factors should be assessed for clinicians. So, those are two areas.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. And that is a new phrase I just learned. I’ve heard of social and structural determinants of health, but not of bone health. That’s interesting. So you can get even more specific about social determinants -- specific subsection of someone’s health. Sorry, was there something else you were going to say there?

[JENN KIRK]

Only that there’s a really lovely book about the determinants of bone health. It’s called “The Social Mosaic Bone health.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Oh. Okay.

[JENN KIRK]

It talks all about how, even in prehistoric times, looking at where people are buried in terms of like their class and even their race, if they are slaves in certain countries, they look at bone health and see that. And so taking things like that and applying it into current day, how does, like, class, race, and social factors determine bone health, that’s kind of where that term is, I guess, a little unique, just adding more specificity to it than broadly speaking about health.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Fascinating. Okay. That’s a nice title for a book too. Is that Bone Health Act that you mentioned, is that something that has bipartisan support? Like how likely is it to pass, or do you have a sense of, yeah, like how broadly popular it is in Congress?

[JENN KIRK]

It is very similar to the one introduced originally in the ‘90s, and so it’s just a revised version of it. It’s an expansion of certain Medicare services in terms of preventive of care, and so I think that it has bipartisan support. It’s just that there are so many other things that take priority sometimes over this. And that’s something that’s common for osteoporosis in general. It’s a very siloed disease, so you don’t know that your bones are maybe potentially becoming weaker over time as you’re losing bone mass until the sentinel event, a bone fracture occurs. But we see, after those bone fractures occurs, so many other negative things happen. So it’s not getting enough attention, more so than I think, like, the support.

Like, you know, if we think about cancer, people have so much information about it. But how many of you knew about what osteoporosis was, or bone health, before today; right?

[J.B. WOGAN]

That’s right. Yeah, it’s probably not leading the front page of the New York Times regularly. Okay. And then all of our listeners are probably going to be people who are interested in becoming summer fellows themselves, either in 2023 or future years. So, I think listeners would probably be more interested to know a little bit more about what that experience was like and what you got out of it. So, if you don’t mind, Katie, we’ll start with you, who did you work with, what was that experience like, and what did you get out of it?

[KATIE ENGEL]

Yeah, so I primarily worked on this project with James Mabli, and it was a real privilege to get to work with him. I cited his work previously in my papers. He’s done some really fascinating studies on early SNAP entrance and psychological distress. So it really felt like a privilege to get to work with such an expert in SNAP policy.

And in addition to working with James, I also got to work with people from a number of different disciplines, you know, psychology, economics, people who really, really strong in methods. So I think, overall, the benefit of participating in this program over the summer was really expanding the scope of how I was thinking about this question and what data source I was thinking about using, and how I was thinking about answering it, because I got to leverage people from so many different backgrounds and disciplines, rather than just sort of my niche policy area, and the world I come from and how I’ve been trained.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah, so if you talk a little bit more about that. What is different about the kind of research that you do in this organizational setting versus in other settings in academia?

[KATIE ENGEL]

Yeah, I think there are a number of differences. I think one thing that stands is -- especially because I’m not a psychologist, I’m not trained in psychology -- getting to talk with some of the psychology experts at Mathematica really emphasized to me the importance of measurement. That’s not something we focus on as much in policy research typically.

But, really, I ended up switching the entire data set I was using because I basically talked with someone who was like, hey, this measure of mental health isn’t really an established valid tool for assessing anxiety/depression, like you need to rethink that. And that’s something that you’re less concerned about sometimes in academia, because you’re more concerned about did my identification strategies for getting at the causal effect really air type, rather than like, hey, what I am even measuring, and how does this compare to other outcomes we’re interested in. So I think taking a step back and thinking about it a little more broadly was really, really helpful.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Jen, I saw you nodding your head. It seems like what Katie was saying resonated with you about revisiting a dataset, or was there something similar about your experience at Mathematica?

[JENN KIRK]

Just a common experience in the doctoral process, more so than specifically at Mathematica.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Got you. Got you. What was your experience like during the Summer Fellowship, and what were some the concrete -- what did you get out of it, for lack of a better term?

[JENN KIRK]

Yeah, so when thinking about applying for this fellowship and the work that I was hoping to do, and then eventually did as a summer fellow, I recognized that on my committee, I have biostatisticians, epidemiologists, and a sociologist. But for my third aim of my dissertation, I was wanting to survey providers and look at implicit racial bias, as well as just how they make screening and treatment decisions in this disease paradigm.

So, I saw that Mathematica had several large projects with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where they developed provider surveys, and I had the honor of working with the survey research team, specifically Geraldine Hale and Barbara Carlson, on how to take my survey measure, which was not a validated survey measure, and move it more towards a validated measure, in addition to coming up with a sampling plan. So, which providers was I going to recruit, from what areas of the nation, so that my results will hopefully be generalizable on this more national aspect than specific to just the State of Maryland, or what’s called convenient sampling, so whoever conveniently sees my posting about responding to the survey then responds to it.

So, that was a lot of lift, because I’m not a survey methodologist, and I got to learn so much about survey methodology, as well as, like, how the effect of this design influences some of my interpretations of results and statistical analysis. And it’s very different from what I do on a daily basis, which is more like academagogical research or behavioral intervention research, and so very different design aspect in terms of that.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. Great. And, Adrienne, what about you? You’ve actually been at Mathematica before. But even still, what was it like to come back here? What was the experience coming back as a summer fellow? Who did you work with? And what were the benefits of being a summer fellow?

[ADRIENNE JONES]

So, this summer, I was paired with Jill Stein as my buddy. And Jill and I had actually worked together previously when I was at Mathematica several years back, so it was really nice to close the loop, so to speak, again. But she was a really useful resource, just kind of as someone who has some expertise in topics around employment and labor, and she does have some interest in kind of the intersection of the criminal/legal system as well. So having someone who has that experience was really useful to just be able to talk through some high-level ideas about my project and what I was learning from that kind of initial round of data analysis.

But I think she was also really helpful with getting me connected with other folks and other resources at Mathematica. During my time their previously, I did a good amount of quantitative work, so data coding and that type of thing. And since I’ve been in my PhD program, I have gravitated more towards qualitative research questions and qualitative methods, to answer those questions. So that’s not something I did when I was at Mathematica, so she really helped me to identify folks who were doing similar kind of work at Mathematica now, so learning more about the types of projects that they’re working on, the types of methods that they are using, and what qualitative methods looks like in more of an applied metric setting outside of the academy.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. The last thing I wanted to talk about was, where do you go from here? What’s next in your academic careers and what’s next in your careers more generally? You know, we’re well past last summer, so, yeah, tell me a little bit about what, to the extent that you know, what’s next? What are you planning? And why don’t we start with Adrienne, and then we’ll go, Katie, and finish up with Jen.

[ADRIENNE JONES]

So, the very near future, writing, writing, writing is the thing that I’m going to be doing. So I’ve been having some very useful but, also, difficult-to-hear conversations with my advisors about the next six months and how I’ve really got to kind of buckle down and grind it out, you know. And there’s no way around it, wrestling with my ideas, putting some of these ideas on paper, and getting some drafts for my committee to review is what I will be doing in the near future.

The next year will be my sixth and final year, so I will be exploring job options and refining a dissertation that I hope to be turning over to the graduate school for consideration about a year from now, which is very exciting. And I’m thinking about career opportunities. I’m exploring a lot of range of career opportunities, from more applied research to academic jobs, government, and everything in between.

And what I’m finding is that I like this work, and I think this work is really important, and I want to keep working on this topic and related topics in my career. So, an opportunity that allows me to do that, and an opportunity that allows me to teach and to share my knowledge are the two things that are most important to me. And I think I can do those things in a variety of spaces. But just identifying the opportunities that feel like a good fit, that allow me to continue developing my content skills, my methodological skills in the areas that I’ve really been enjoying since I’ve been in grad school. And outlets to continue sharing that information with folks, I think will be a good fit for me.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Katie, what’s next for you?

[KATIE ENGEL]

Yeah, so I can go back a little bit to the summer, even though it seems so long ago now. But one of the, I think, advantages of doing the fellowship was getting these events to the end of the summer to do a broad Mathematica audience that wasn’t just SNAP experts or nutrition people. And so from that presentation, I walked away with so many questions from people about, hey, how do school closures interact with the SNAP policy change? How does unemployment insurance expansion interact with the SNAP policy change?

So I think, broadly, it’s this project and through my other dissertation research, I’m really interested in diving into how do social safety nets operate as a whole? How do these programs interact with each other, and asking questions of a little bit more broad scope like that. I guess directly, I have about a year-and-a-half left for my PhD training, and so, all of a sudden, my dissertation route is a year-and-a half, which is still a long way off, but I’m sure it will quickly approach.

Similar to Jen, I’m really interested in doing applied research for an organization like Mathematica, where I can work not just on SNAP but on other sort of policy issues related to family wellbeing and inequality.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. Excellent. Jen, I want to turn to you.

[JENN KIRK]

What’s next for me? Defending my dissertation and writing up papers is the first answer. But I think you’re looking for a slightly more long-term answer. So, I would love to work for some organization like Mathematica, or for Mathematica, doing health policy research, looking at this unequal care that we currently are seeing in this country. So, a lot of structural factors like what’s called de jure or de facto segregation. So, although no longer do we have segregation in this country, it's that people have settled in a certain region or certain areas, and so sometimes there’s not as many services available for people in those areas, or access to quality health care because a provider, or anybody, an individual when they’re deciding where to settle for their career might make that decision based on the structure and poverty or things like that, so lack of access in care. Mathematica is one place that does that, and so that’s where I’d like to start my career.

But maybe in about ten years, I would love to go do research on aging in the Caribbean, and looking at all aspects of wellness, so mental health, physical health, and nutritional health. That would be the ultimate goal. And I see working in policy research as being the way to, like, slowly move towards doing that.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. Wait. Maybe I missed this earlier, but why in the Caribbean?

[JENN KIRK]

Oh, my family is originally from Puerto Rico, and I see it as a way of paying it forward or paying it backwards to my family and my family roots, especially there is not as much funding out there, and they’re consistently hit with harsh hurricane weather, and a lot of older adults live in Puerto Rico specifically. It’s a slightly higher proportion than to the average population of Hispanic individuals in the U.S., but so fewer services are available there than in the 50 states.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. So there are both kind of personal historical reasons why you would be interested in that area, but, also, it sounds like a really fascinating region or area for the policy questions and the health questions that you’re exploring. Okay.

And then I said that was my last question, but there is always one more I like to ask, which is, what am I forgetting to ask? Is there something specific about the Summer Fellowship Program I failed to ask about that you think listeners should know?

[JENN KIRK]

Yes.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yes. Okay. Bring it.

[JENN KIRK]

The closure of working at a place like Mathematica or experiencing the staff at Mathematica. So not only was it an extremely positive experience, but I think sometimes in graduate school, there is this very mental shift, not only depending on who your mentor is and how you interact in that environment, a lot of time, it’s like knowledge is being handed to you to suss out and disentangle these relationships for a real discovery, and so you’re almost like in an apprenticeship position, versus, while a summer fellow at Mathematica, it was really encouraging and almost like a refreshing change in atmosphere to where, when I brought in my research ideas, they were like, how can we improve your research, let’s expand this. These are the ways that we can contribute to it.

So, seeing how communication and just how Mathematica’s approach to research and community when it comes to balancing life, work, research interests was really great, because if I start out in aging research but I have multiple interests, it seemed like Mathematica allowed for you to have your primary research area or interest area, but then expand to other areas as you got more comfortable, and I think they called it “scaled up” into the different domains or projects. So, sometimes we’re so siloed into one area in academia, and I’ve always considered myself a Jack of all trades or a Jenn of all trades, as in, there are so many things I’m interested it, it’s been hard to narrow it down to one. But at Mathematica, I wouldn’t have to do that.

[ADRIENNE JONES]

Yeah, absolutely. I think collaboration was really important and something that was quite evident. I think the thing that was most useful is being able to talk to folks who aren’t familiar with this project, so folks having fresh eyes. And people ask me some really, really smart and thoughtful questions, and that pushed me, but also encouraged me to keep moving forward with this work, and I think that was really instrumental to moving this work forward. Particularly for PhD students who may be in more traditional schools or traditional departments, and who aren’t sure about what research can look like outside of the academy, I think something like the Summer Fellowship is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity, because there are folks who were doing good work in all types of industries, and sometimes we just aren’t exposed to that. And I think an opportunity like this really helps to open the possibilities of what we can do with our knowledge and with our skillset, even if we choose not to look at those academic jobs.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Thank you so much for speaking with me today and sharing your experiences about the Summer Fellowship Program, and I wish you all luck in the next stages in your careers.

[KATIE ENGEL]

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Thanks again to my guests, Jenn Kirk, Katie Engel, and Adrienne Jones. Applications for Mathematica’s 2023 Summer Fellowship Program are due on February 28th, 2023. As a reminder, a full transcript of the episode is available in our show notes and on a blog at Mathematica.org.

My colleague, the animable Rick Stoddard, produced this episode. I also want to thank you for listening to another episode of On the Evidence, the Mathematica Podcast. Stay up to date on future episodes by subscribing to wherever you listen to podcasts, or follow us on social media. Mathematica is on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.