Redesigning and Expanding WPI’s Summer STEM Programs for Middle School Girls

The underrepresentation of females in STEM fields limits innovation. The purpose of this project was to develop resources for the Office of Pre-Collegiate Outreach Programs at Worcester Polytechnic Institute to aid them in their expansion of summer STEM programs, increasing opportunities for middle school girls to get involved as well as increasing female engagement in STEM. We analyzed the effectiveness of previous activities and developed 25 modules as frameworks for designing effective STEM outreach programs for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade girls

Estimating Effectiveness of Identifying Human Trafficking via Data Envelopment Analysis

Transit monitoring is a preventative approach used to identify possible cases of human trafficking while an individual is in transit or before one crosses a border. Transit monitoring is often conducted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who train staff to identify and intercept suspicious activity. Love Justice International (LJI) is one such NGO that has been conducting transit monitoring for 14 years along the Nepal-India border at approximately 25-30 monitoring stations. In partnership with LJI, we developed a system that uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) to help LJI decision-makers evaluate the performance of these stations and make specific operational improvement recommendations. We identified efficient stations, compared rankings of station performance, and recommended strategies to improve efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of DEA in the anti-human trafficking domain