Across America, service providers are doing great work to tackle the complexities of poverty, but there is little data to prove what’s working and why. Notre Dame's Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) helps service providers apply scientific evaluation methods to better understand and unleash effective poverty interventions.In 2012 Catholic Charities of Chicago approached LEO to assess its programming to determine if it was effectively keeping people off the streets. The problem, the charity explained, is that the success of call centers is often measured by the number of calls, rather than the number of people successfully kept in their homes. Could LEO researchers measure the call center’s effectiveness rather than volume?In 2016, Professor Bill Evans and his team found that people who received emergency funds from Catholic Charities were 76 percent less likely to become homeless, and to date, more than 700 families have been kept in their homes because of the program. This affirmative assessment proved the emergency grants were not just a temporary solution and were a cost-effective use of funds. Now other cities across the country are using Notre Dame’s work to inform their own strategies on homelessness prevention.Learn more: https://go.nd.edu/WWYFFHomelessness
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- 2:03Fighting to Protect Our CountrySince 1993, the International Atomic Energy Agency has tracked 2,500 trafficking cases of nuclear material. While there has yet to be a detonation of a dirty bomb, the threat remains present. In the unlikely event of a nuclear attack on American soil, Notre Dame engineering professor Antonio Simonetti makes one thing clear: The perpetrator could and would be found.Simonetti is a geochemist who specializes in characterizing the chemical and isotopic composition of materials. Traditionally, that involves studying rocks and minerals, which Simonetti did for many years. In 2011 he pivoted to assess nuclear materials like trinitite at the request of National Nuclear Security Agency. In that role, he used laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) to study blast melt from the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 and precisely identified where remnants of plutonium fuel resided after the explosion.More: http://ntrda.me/FTProtectOurCountry
- 2:08Fighting Mosquito-borne Diseases
