VCU Research Festival: From Ideas to Impact

Since its beginning, VCU has been inextricably intertwined with the Richmond community - physically, socially, and economically. That dynamic interdependence, if leveraged correctly, can help us achieve the vision of Quest 2028. VCU’s website notes, “...our past has made us who we are…” And that past has not always helped maintain our critical relationship with the surrounding community. It is telling that this year’s VCU Common Book is Organ Thieves — a book about VCU’s own Henrietta Lacks story. Research at VCU led to Virginia’s first organ transplants, but there are different stories we can tell about VCU’s historic roads to success. And the stories our community has heard have not always built bridges. We want to change that. We also want to open VCU’s doors to the surrounding community. Many academic institutions are seen as “ivory towers,” but that is not the mission of VCU. We want to pull back the curtain on the impactful, innovative research happening here so that the community better understands what we’re working on. Where and how can we engage the Richmond community with VCU’s research and earn their trust? Richmonders love festivals. They are a part of our shared culture — a place where we can celebrate differences, learn from each other, and enjoy being good neighbors. We propose a VCU Research festival to rebuild the critical relationship between VCU and the community. The VCU Research Festival will build goodwill with the community surrounding VCU by showcasing the impactful and innovative research happening at VCU and the VCU Health System (referred to collectively as “OneVCU”). We envision a oneday event where diverse VCU faculty and student researchers from across disciplines will showcase their work in a single space, emphasizing interactive/hands-on displays that engage attendees. Our goal is for the event to feel like a festival, including art performances, TED Talkstyle presentations, food trucks, etc. The event will be open to the public, helping VCU share its mission with the community, demonstrate its commitment to benefiting humanity at large, and lay the additional groundwork for community-engaged research. Key external stakeholders, including elected officials, donors, and business leaders, would be invited to attend, improving VCU’s local reputation and national prominence. Planning of the event will require the collaborative work of several units at VCU, including the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation (OVPRI), University Relations, the Provost’s office, and the Office of Institutional Equity, Effectiveness, and Success

THE ROLE OF INTERDEPENDENCE IN THE MICRO-FOUNDATIONS OF ORGANIZATION DESIGN: TASK, GOAL, AND KNOWLEDGE INTERDEPENDENCE

Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the organization design process. In this context, task interdependence was rightly assumed to be exogenously determined by characteristics of the work and the technology. We no longer live in that world, yet our view of interdependence has remained exceedingly task-centric and our treatment of interdependence overly deterministic. As organizations face increasingly unpredictable workstreams and workers co-design the organization alongside managers, our field requires a more comprehensive toolbox that incorporates aspects of agent-based interdependence. In this paper, we synthesize research in organization design, organizational behavior, and other related literatures to examine three types of interdependence that characterize organizations’ workflows: task, goal, and knowledge interdependence. We offer clear definitions for each construct, analyze how each arises endogenously in the design process, explore their interrelations, and pose questions to guide future research

Monitoring a Poisson Process in Several Categories Subject to Changes in the Arrival Rates

Abstract. We look at a Poisson process in several categories where the arrival rate changes at some unknown integer. For some of these categories the arrival rates increase, while in other categories the arrival rates decrease. The point at which the process changes may be different for each category. We develop procedures for detecting when a change has occurred in at least one of the categories. We provide some numerical results to illustrate the effectiveness of the detection procedures

Monitoring a Poisson process in several categories subject to changes in the arrival rates

We look at a Poisson process in several categories where the arrival rate changes at some unknown integer. For some of these categories the arrival rates increase, while in other categories the arrival rates decrease. The point at which the process changes may be different for each category. We develop procedures for detecting when a change has occurred in at least one of the categories. We provide some numerical results to illustrate the effectiveness of the detection procedures.

A note on optimal stopping for possible change in the intensity of an ordinary Poisson process

Peskir and Shiryaev [2002. Solving the Poisson disorder problem. In: Advances in Finance and Stochastics: Essays in Honor of Dieter Sonderman. Springer, New York, pp. 295-312] determined the optimal stopping rule for a problem of quick detection of a change-point in the intensity of a homogeneous ordinary Poisson process, when the cost per unit time of delayed detection is in a given range, and the change-point occurs at random times following a mixed exponential distribution. Using the same Bayesian framework, we extend their results to a range of cost values not considered before. We obtain the results by using the Dynamic Programming rather than the analytical methods used by Peskir and Shiryaev.Poisson process Markovian Arrival rate Dynamic programming Risk

Developing a Holistic Measurement Plan for Transition to Adulthood

Transition to adulthood is a process faced by all adolescents, which includes the domains of health, education, employment, finance and community, and encompasses legal, social, and emotional components. Significant structural barriers and social injustices and inequities exist on this pathway and are often ignored. Multidisciplinary experts are all invested in a “successful” transition, but are siloed and have historically created strategies to measure transition that are specific to their field and narrow in focus. Such data collection approaches reinforce fragmented practices and are a significant barrier to collaborative multi-stakeholder approaches to providing transition care. Through collaboration between the Schools of Medicine, Law, Education, and Social Work, this project will develop an innovative holistic measurement plan for evaluating the quality of care received during the transition from pediatric to adult services. First, through partnership with the Carnegie Mellon University Transition Design Institute, we will engage young adults and their families and key stakeholders in medicine, education, law, and the community in visually mapping the comprehensive journey to adulthood. Second, we will use these results to create an objective and holistic outcomes assessment strategy that accurately reflects and positively reinforces the benefits of multi-systemic care. The strategy developed in this grant will be concretely used in future research proposals to evaluate the impact of systems-level changes and interventions in adolescent transition care across the medical, legal, financial, social and educational realms. It is our intention to break apart the existing silos and support adolescents’ transition to adulthood holistically and equitably