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It started with a text while folding laundry on a Sunday afternoon. It turned into the first-of-its-kind "Moving Beyond Implications: Research into Policy" conference in Hartford. Dr. Kerri Raissian and I, at our prospective houses, were folding laundry and texting one another, when the idea came about: How great would it be if there was a way to bridge the divide between legislators creating policy and academics who had access to the research and data that would help create and evaluate better policies?
And "Moving Beyond" was born.
The half-day event on January 9 at the Legislative Office included 15 research presentations from academics and students from UConn, UConn School of Medicine, Trinity, and Yale, to eight standing committees of the Connecticut General Assembly, including Judiciary, Public Health, Education, and Environment. It also involved state agencies such as the Department of Public Health, Office of Policy and Management, Department of Energy and Environment, Department of Social Services, Department of Developmental Services, Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Labor.
Often research and possible policy implications by the state's academics are tucked behind a paywall, and most legislators don't have access to it. As the only research scientist in the legislature, I'm often asked to seek out research papers on specific topics by committee chairs. And often that information needs to be decoded to fully understand it.
We know the conference is already working - State Rep. Jeff Currey, Chair of the Education Committee, and Rep. Kathleen McCarty, the Education Committee's ranking member, both look forward to considering policy on do-it-yourself indoor air purifiers - Corsi-Rosenthal or "C-R Boxes." These air purifiers cost about $4 per student per academic year to make. C-R Boxes are both an accessible STEM project for Connecticut students, and they improve indoor air quality in a way that is both statistically and substantively significant. In fact, Rep. Currey already has plans to meet with the academics on this presentation and work on it this session.
We had such a great turnout and great connections made between legislators and academics, which is what our goal was. But we won't stop with this one conference. We'd love to make this a yearly event and we already have our eyes on December 2024, ahead of the 2025 session.
Dr. Kerri Raissian of the UConn Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP) and the Scholar Strategy Network (CT SSN) said, "The relationships you're building today, you don't know where they're going to go. You don't know when a state representative is going to text you while you're folding laundry and say, 'In eight weeks, would you like to do a conference with me' and you're going to say yes, and it will be one of the best laundry-folding adventures you've ever had."
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What you're thinking about the state of our local hospitals?
