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Just today, The Denver Post came out with an article written by David Pyrooz, from the Population Program, CU Population Center, and Prevention Science Program, and his fellow researchers. David's research team includes Justin Nix from the University of Nebraska Omaha, and Scott Wolfe from Michigan State University. The year 2020 has been a devastating year for all and has exacerbated many problems, including the homicide rate. In Denver alone, the homicide rate increased by 50% in 2020 which was higher than the average rate in 34 other U.S. cities. Many have wondered why the rate was so high and Pyrooz and other researchers have found evidence that the cause of this spike in violence is not necessarily due to COVID, but rather it is due to a legitimacy crisis within the criminal justice system. 

They came to this realization due to data from the Denver Police Department’s crime, policing, and traffic data from 2016 to 2020. They found that the killing of George Floyd and other acts of police brutality over the summer led to anti-sentiment against the police and a legitimacy crisis. Pyrooz and his colleagues then focused on three major effects of the crisis: depolicing, depleted trust in the law, and de-legitimacy of the law. Based on data, specifically from depolicing, they concluded that the effects of the legitimacy crisis were the driving causes of the high homicide rates in Denver this past year. 

To read more about Pyrooz’s research read the full article on The Denver Post website.

Two new articles from the Washington Post and Global Voices both feature research conducted by John O’Loughlin, from the Program on International Development and his colleagues. On February 12, 2015 the Minsk II accords left the Donbas region territorially divided with the Ukrainian government controlling the western side and two separatist entities controlling the eastern side. O’Loughlin and his research team conducted a survey on both sides and they found drastically different opinions regarding the war in Donbas. On the eastern side, they found trust in the authorities to be higher among residents; however, on the western side, they found trust in the authorities to be much lower among residents. Their survey also shows that residents disagree on the future status of Donbas as an autonomous region. The team also made a research presentation on the results at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Eurasian and Russian Studies on February and the video of the talk is available on Youtube. 

To read more about the conflict in Donbas, read the full article at The Washington Post or at Global Voices.

David Pyrooz, from CUPC, the Population Program, and the Prevention Science Program just received the 2021 Boulder Faculty Excellence Award in Research, Scholarly, and Creative Work. This award recognizes Pyrooz as an outstanding scholar who has made substantial theoretical and practical interdisciplinary contributions to our understanding of prisons, gangs, COVID, youth and families at risk, and extremists. Congrats David! 

Also, below is a list of previous IBS winners of Boulder Faculty Excellence Awards. 

• Matt McQueen – Excellence in Leadership and Service – 2018
• Stefanie Mollborn – Excellence in Teaching and Pedagogy – 2015
• Nicholas Flores – Excellence in Leadership and Service – 2015
• Michael Radelet – Excellence in Research, Scholarly, and Creative Work – 2012
• Michael Radelet – Excellence in Leadership and Service – 2008
• Kai Larsen – Excellence in in Teaching and Pedagogy – 2006
• Rick Rogers – Excellence in Research, Scholarly, and Creative Work – 2006
• Fred Pampel – Excellence in Research, Scholarly, and Creative Work – 2003
• Keith Maskus – Excellence in Research, Scholarly, and Creative Work – 2003 
• John O’Loughlin – Excellence in Research, Scholarly, and Creative Work – 2001

To see other 2021 awardees, view the full list on the Boulder Faculty Assembly website. 

“*If we are missing an IBS colleague who has received this award, please email Eileen.Brown@colorado.edu. Thank you!”

Two new articles from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Research Report highlights the work of two IBS researchers. The first article focuses on research conducted by Lori Hunter, Director of the CU Population Center and the Population Program. Her research highlights the sociodemographic and economic characteristics of rural America. Collaborators on this project include Myron Gutmann, Stefan Leyk, Catherine Talbot, Johannes Uhl, and Dylan Connor from Arizona State University. The second article focuses on research conducted by Allison Atteberry, an IBS fellow. Her research highlights the work schools are doing to reduce inequalities in education during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

To learn more about Lori Hunter’s work read the full article, and to learn more about Allison Atteberry’s work read the full article.

We are delighted to announce the renaming of the Program on Problem Behavior and Positive Youth Development at the Institute of Behavioral Science at CU Boulder to (more simply) the Prevention Science Program. Established as the Problem Behavior Program by Dick Jessor and colleagues in 1966, the program was later renamed by Delbert Elliott and colleagues to the Program on Problem Behavior and Positive Youth Development in 2012. In the ensuing 8 years, program members recognized that these names no longer fully represent the breadth of our work and do not resonate with contemporary language used in the field, nor with our envisioned future directions. As a collective, we decided that a Prevention Science Framework can be used effectively to organize all of the work being done in the program.

We recognize the importance of acknowledging our legacy, and do not make the change lightly. The Prevention Science Program builds upon a strong foundation of the original framework of Problem Behavior Theory…but it has grown much broader in theory, research and translational activities across the lifespan. Currently, we do work in basic science, in the development and testing of interventions, and (through collaboration with communities) the translation of those interventions to have a real impact on children, adolescents, adults and their families.  As such, Prevention Science provides a better framework for organizing all of the current and future activities of our program.

We are very excited about this fresh direction, and hope you will enjoy learning more about the Prevention Science Program at IBS in the coming years!

(The above brief was provided by the Prevention Science Coordinating Committee.)

Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS) and CU Population Center (CUPC) had a record number of responses for their calls for proposals for Research Development Awards/Seed Grants!  We had a total of 15 applications between the two funding calls and were able to fund almost $125,000 in awards using IBS, CUPC, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and Program funds. 

The IBS Research Development Awards were open to all CU faculty and research staff (with preference given to IBS Fellows and staff), and particularly welcomed proposals that advanced equity, diversity, and inclusion themes in substance, methods and personnel. The CUPC Seed Grants sought proposals that highlighted health behaviors and disparities, reproductive health, gene-environment, environmental demography, and migration as well as work within the Rocky Mountain Research Data Center (RMRDC) or collaboration with CU’s Earth Lab.

IBS and CUPC would like to acknowledge that several additional IBS Programs contributed finances to allow us to fund more of the awards than we had initially been able to budget for. Thank you to Environment and Society, Health and Society, Problem Behavior and Positive Youth Development, the Population Program, and the Program on International Development for your contributions.

The funded proposals were:

– “Racial disparities in genetic associations: the role of environmentally induced epigenetic modifications."  Jason Boardman

– “Health and Well-being after Abrupt Return Migration in Coastal Bangladesh.” Amanda Carrico

– “How immigration became temporary in Colorado, 2005-2020.” David Cook-Martin

– “Covid-19, Tourism, and Conservation in Dryland Africa: Changing environments and populations.” Mara Goldman

– “Understanding Mortality Disparities using High Spatial Resolution Data.” Myron Gutmann, Stefan Leyk, Cyrus Hester

– “Immigration, Domestic Migration, and Geographic Variation in Adult Mortality Trends in the United States.” Ryan Masters

– “Examining the Representation of Ethnic Minority Groups in Preventive Intervention Research.” Pamela Buckley

– “An Analysis of the Equilibrium Labor Market Impact of the Covid-19 Crisis and Policy Responses Across Demographic Groups and Locations.” Jeronimo Carballo, Richard Mansfield, James Flynn

– “Understanding and Promoting Sexual and Reproductive Health of Youth with Child Welfare Involvement” Katie Massey Combs

– “Youth Deaths Involving Firearms: Identifying Trends and Contextual Characteristics to Inform Prevention Strategies.” Erin Kelly, Jani Little

– “Wars over Territory and Micro-foundations of Public Attitudes.” Jaroslav Tir

Also thank you to the review committee members. The proposals this year made the decision making very hard, all of the proposals were so good! 

IBS's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE) Committee was just awarded the 2020-21 Diversity and Inclusive Excellence Grant. Erin Kelly from the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence and member of the DEI Committee and Fernando Riosmena, Director of DEI at IBS, put together the proposal on behalf of the DEI Committee. They were awarded $3,000 for their proposal titled “Interrupting Structural & Institutional Racism by Centering Equity throughout the Research Process.” This will be used towards implementing a workshop on how to center equity throughout the research process from design to dissemination. All IBS staff and other CU Boulder research staff will be invited and encouraged to attend these workshops beginning in Spring 2021.  A brief description and goals of the project are listed below. 

“Centering equity in research has the power to interrupt important forms of structural and institutional racism. How we ask research questions, collect, analyze, and interpret data, and disseminate findings can reproduce forms of inequity by ignoring or tacitly accepting problematic aspects of the status quo, thus reproducing it in interpretation.

This project will create an explicit focus on asking research questions, conducting research activities, and sharing research findings with an understanding of the structures and systems that shape different groups’ experiences, such as racism, discrimination, and other forms of exclusion. In this way, we will draw attention to the need for research that addresses the problem and its root causes within marginalized communities. Researchers will be better equipped to self-examine and identify biases, better incorporate community voices in all research stages, share power in decision-making at critical stages, critically consider data ownership, respond to cultural sensitivities and context, and share findings directly with communities who are the focus of research studies more productively.

Our goal is thus to build the capacity of social science researchers (faculty, research faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students) on centering equity in four key research stages: planning and research design, data collection, data analysis, and reporting and dissemination. We will hold a series of professional trainings on how to center equity within each of these stages, each paired with facilitated workshops where one or more researchers (faculty, research faculty, or graduate students) will share an example of their current or future research projects to consider how the lessons earned from the trainings can be applied to real-world research projects. This project will inform institutional guidelines on how research institutes can center equity in their research activities, and will be open to and shared as a proof of concept for other CU research institutes, centers, departments, and programs to center equity in research.” 

A new article from the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine highlights groundbreaking research done on how we understand evolving cities. This research was conducted by Stefan Leyk and Johannes Uhl from the CU Population Center and Population Program. Previous research in this field understood that most cities in the U.S. have developed in the same way. However, the research conducted by Leyk and Uhl reveals a different perspective. Using novel spatial-temporal data created and published by their research group, they discovered a long history of urban size becoming increasingly independent of urban form, leading them to believe that cities are not all evolving in the same way. According to their analysis, urban size tends to move in a single direction whereas urban form can change depending on geography and topographic constraints. Stefan Leyk comments on this “We can learn so much more about our cities and urban development, if we know how to exploit these kinds of new data, and I think this really confirms our approach,” (Leyk). 

They applied statistical methods and data mining algorithms to see what is the nature of long-term settlement development, particularly for metropolitan statistical areas, or highly urban geographic regions.“This long-term characterization of urban development is something that is really novel about that analysis because this could not be done prior to that because such data were just not available,” said Johannes Uhl. 

To read more about their research, read the full article on the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine’s Website and watch their data animations on YouTube.

A new article from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) features the work of Terry McCabe, Director of the Environment and Society program at IBS and recently awarded 2020 AAAS fellow. From 1980 to 1996 Professor McCabe worked as part of the South Turkana Ecosystem Project among Turkana pastoralists in northwestern Kenya. His book on the Turkana: Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies worn the 2005 Julian Steward Award for the best book written in Ecological/Environmental Anthropology published the previous year.  For 31 years now, McCabe has also been working in northern Tanzania on several projects in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Simanjiro plains to the east of Tarangire National Park. He has not only studied the geographical landscape of this area, but also the politics, ecology, and Maasai people who inhabit these lands. Most recently he has been studying a devastating drought that occurred from 2008-2009 in Africa and the effects it’s had on the local communities. To read more about Terry McCabe’s lifelong research, read the full article on the AAAS website.