Chancellor's First Year: Real-World Research, Grounded in Lived Experience
One of Chancellor Tonya Smith-Jackson’s biggest priorities is expanding research across all disciplines at Rutgers-Newark, transforming it from an R2 research institution to an R1, which signifies very high research activity, according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. As part 3 of our series on the chancellor’s first year anniversary at Rutgers-Newark, we asked her about the caliber of research here and what makes it exceptional. Find parts 1 and 2 of the series here and here.
Smith-Jackson, a human factors engineer who holds a doctorate in psychology/ergonomics and an interdisciplinary master’s in psychology and industrial engineering, also described her own research and work in the tech industry and how this honed her ability to consider a range of people when designing products and systems.
What distinguishes research at Rutgers-Newark and why is it important that we become an R1 research school? How does that process work?
It’s about looking at ways in which we can expand the great research we're already doing, finding new avenues that we may not have identified, and then figuring out ways to expand that through funding. We formed a task force and we’re providing faculty training now for research, including seed grants to help people to do pilot work in order to be competitive for funding. And when I think of research expansion, it also involves discussions with elected officials and community partners about what research really is, so that they're not just thinking it's petri dishes, although petri dishes are important, too, and how microbes behave. But at the same time, research is about looking at societal challenges, and much of our research at Rutgers-Newark is about societal challenges. What's missing in research, and has been for decades, is having people with certain lenses and lived experience do the research. We have that here. When people don't have a lived experience, it's hard to tell the story in a way that incorporates ground truth. Researchers need to be doing the work in partnership with the people who are experiencing the issues they’re researching. So if you're going to go out and study incarceration and re-entry, and what helps you seek a job and make a living post-incarceration, it's important that we have people here at Rutgers-Newark and people in that community doing the research together.
We have a history professor, Melissa Cooper, who is really changing the discourse around the Gullah people because she has the lens of lived experience. Anthropologists and non-Gullah people have described the Gullah people from their own lens. Our own professor originates from the Gullay community. She wrote a book to really take back the narrative and say, no, here's who we really are and this is what our history has been and this is how we perceive our treatment in the United States. Being able to have someone indigenous to the community tell the story makes it a different story that is closer to ground truth. There is an old proverb that says, if the elephant could tell the story, the lion would not be the king of the jungle.
Xuejian Wu is an experimental atomic physicist working with quantum sensors that can eventually be used for metrology, navigation and geological surveys for underground water storage estimations and volcano activity monitors. This research also has implications for sensing, computing and energy-conversion to make a trip to Mars more practical.
Some people will say, "Well, it’s not important to get to Mars because we have problems right here." Yes, but Mars might give us some ideas about how to address problems here. There are ice crystals on Mars. Ultimately, those ice crystals might tell us something about climate science and how our own atmosphere might be affected by certain conditions. What can we learn from that and apply it to water and air on Earth? What happens to the human body and mind on the journey to Mars?
The late Nikki Giovanni has a powerful poem about this very experience and relates the human experience during the Middle Passage to how it might feel on a journey to Mars – “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pear (We’re Gong to Mars).” Concepts such as disconnection from points of origin and sense of identity, physical and mental impacts of long-term encapsulation and at what point physical adaptation will occur are important to explore. The connection between human experience and other-world human experience will reveal much about our past and our future.
How has your own experience in engineering and STEM fields informed your perspective on creating a research environment that produces findings that serve a wide range of people?
When people were doing usability studies, they tend to go to the same folks over and over again. They’re not all representative of the population. They don't often consider people with disabilities or people in rural areas or from different countries or cultures. For instance, a car needs to function differently in a rural area compared to a city area. So there's a lot of geographic bias. There's age bias, and then we ultimately end up with designs that are not universal designs. They're not user-centered for everyone, which leads to disproportionate benefits. When they're only designed for certain people, then only certain people get the benefits of the technology. Others may not even want to use it because it contradicts the way they function in the world.
