The Public Impact Research Awards recognize individuals or teams at UCLA who have made a concerted effort to translate their research or creative activities for public benefit.
2024 Awardees
Terence Keel
Terence Keel is a professor with appointments in UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics and the Department of African American Studies.
Shocked by the murder of George Floyd yet propelled by the public protests of police violence in 2020, Terence Keel shifted his research focus from religion, history, science, and culture to investigate deaths of individuals in police encounters and in custody. Working with academic colleagues and community partners Dignity and Power Now and JusticeLA, Keel has turned to study how medical examiners-coroners process deaths in custody and their findings tend to naturalize state violence by describing these deaths as due to “preexisting conditions.” Keel’s research group, the BioCritical Studies Lab, involves 40 undergraduate students who analyze laws, policies, and institutions around the country as well as autopsies of those dying in custody to understand this process of naturalization. This research has enabled families and activists to better understand what happens to loved ones dying in custody. Keel has also been involved in drafting laws in California and Maryland and pursuing a lawsuit in Pennsylvania for public transparency, release of records, and independent investigations about deaths in custody. Keel has, to date, coauthored scholarly articles about deaths in LA County jails and police use of pepper spray.
Nicholas Shapiro and the Carceral Ecologies Lab
Nicholas Shapiro is an assistant professor in UCLA's Institute for Society of Genetics.
Nicholas Shapiro and his Carceral Ecologies Lab have made a unique and vital public impact stretching over a decade. Deeply rooted in local, national, and global struggles for racial and environmental justice, Shapiro and his lab have developed a sophisticated array of tools to advance health equity. These include timely white papers, mini-documentaries viewed by millions, lawsuits against the LA Sheriff who illegally suppressed public documents, and the development of low-cost instruments to allow those with the highest stakes in environmental justice issues access to the tools of robust scientific knowledge production. Shapiro has additionally collaborated with leading artists to reconceptualize relationships between humans and their environments, as well with local groups in LA focused on environmental and racial justice. From temporarily housing community members in his home to helping to change state and federal policies, Shapiro and his lab exemplify both a tie to the grassroots and high impact stewardship of public discourse around complex and challenging social justice issues. The lab itself also aims to actualize more equitable practices for academic research by recruiting formerly incarcerated and system impacted students, putting those who are most excluded from scientific research at the cutting edge of public impact research.
Steven Shoptaw
Steven Shoptaw is a professor with appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and Family Medicine, as well as Director of the UCLA Vine Street Clinic.
Steven Shoptaw is a recognized leader in academic research on substance use and, more importantly, a driving force behind the translation of this work to address the needs of communities most heavily impacted by addiction and HIV. He has brought cutting edge research directly to the most underserved and marginalized communities through establishment of a research clinic in Hollywood, a medically underserved area with high rates of substance use and overdose death. He also launched a research mobile clinic in 2020 that brings medication assisted treatment and other health services to those with limited access to transportation and other barriers to care. He leads the Case-based Learning Collaborative on Stimulants which draws physicians, nurses, social workers, and community health workers and provides them with real-world scenarios and evidence-based approaches to treat patients with stimulant use disorders, including contingency management. He has further used his expertise in a collaboration with the LA County Department of Health and local community based organizations to evaluate their use of contingency management to address drug use and unruly behaviors that often interfere with the capacity of individuals to remain in housing. His career serves as a model of socially committed, community-based scholarship.
Tenant Power Toolkit
Award shared by Hannah Appel, Gary Blasi, and Ananya Roy
Hannah Appel is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.
Gary Blasi is a professor of law emeritus at the UCLA School of Law.
Ananya Roy is a professor with appointments in the Departments of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography, The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy, and the Founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.
As Covid-19 descended, millions of tenants lost their wages overnight, threatening mass eviction. In an early publication, Professor Gary Blasi estimated that 365,000 renter households in Los Angeles County alone were at risk (Blasi 2020). In response, Professors Appel, Roy and Blasi worked with community partners to launch the Tenant Power Toolkit, an online eviction defense application that helps any California tenant facing a legal eviction to file an Answer with the court. Working with housing justice lawyers, technologists, and community partners, the TPT team coded the regulatory landscape of California’s 580 jurisdictions into a program tenants can easily use on any internet-connected device, in Spanish or English, to assert their jurisdiction-specific defenses. Since the TPT launched in July 2022, more than 8,000 Eviction Answers have been prepared by the Toolkit, allowing ~21,000 California tenants—over a third of them children— to avoid default eviction. The TPT’s backend database provides unprecedented tenant-reported, real-time eviction data by zip code, landlord, tenant race/ethnicity and more. This research-organizing partnership enables tenants to fight their evictions, produces data to support ongoing and new tenant organizing, while also building translocal tenant power at a scale that can contend with the consolidation of rental housing ownership.
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2023 Awardees
UCLA COVID Behind Bars Data Project
Award shared by Sharon Dolovich and Aaron Littman
The UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project was founded in early 2020, in the first days of the pandemic, to track the impact of COVID on prisons, jails, and other carceral facilities. Sharon Dolovich and Aaron Littman assembled a team of hundreds, including many student and alumni volunteers, to compile and analyze information, and the Project’s work and reports have regularly appeared in media stories about the pandemic and prisons. Initially built around an open-source spreadsheet, the Project grew to have a full-time staff and well over a hundred volunteers. Through web-scraping and public records requests, the Project compiled a comprehensive database of infections, deaths, testing, and vaccinations, an index of prison policy changes, and a clearinghouse of litigation. Prisoner advocates across the country cited the Project’s data in emergency release motions, and journalists from countless media outlets drew on it in their reporting. The CDC relied on the Project’s data, and the U.S. Senate twice invited the Project’s input into its investigations of deaths in custody.
Yousef Bozorgnia
Yousef Bozorgnia has spent decades carrying out impactful research in seismic hazard analysis and earthquake engineering. He has been the principal investigator of multiple sets of large multi-researcher research programs to quantify ground movements during earthquakes. The outcomes of these research programs are used worldwide for seismic analysis and design of a wide spectrum of structures ranging from single-family homes to tall buildings, bridges, power plants, dams, and water and natural gas infrastructure. In the United States, seismic designs in all seismic regions are impacted by the results of the community-based research projects that Bozorgnia has led. These projects provide important databases and models to compute the level of ground shaking during earthquakes. The U.S. Geological Survey adopts these models to generate seismic hazard maps for the entire U.S., which are used by professionals for seismic design and evaluation.
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2022 Awardees
Laura Abrams and Elizabeth Barnert
Laura Abrams is professor and chair of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Elizabeth Barnert is an associate professor of pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Abrams and Barnert conducted research that helped lead to a minimum age law to protect younger children from juvenile legal involvement. California Senate Bill 439, passed in 2018, excludes children age 11 and under from juvenile court jurisdiction. Advocates have since partnered with Abrams and Barnert to lead other states to pass or consider similar legislation.
Dana Cuff
Dana Cuff is a professor of architecture and urban design at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. Cuff is also founding director of cityLAB, an award-winning research center that studies how urbanism and architecture can contribute to a more just built environment. Based on cityLAB studies, Cuff and her team created BruinHub, a “home away from home” at the John Wooden Center for commuter and housing-insecure students. Cuff also co-authored a 2016 bill to advance the implementation of backyard homes in suburbs, and is working on design and legislation for affordable housing to be co-located with public schools.
Alex Hall
Alex Hall is a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, whose research is focused on producing highresolution projections for climate modeling, particularly in California. Hall is also working to understand the future of water resources and wildfires in the state. He co-founded the Climate & Wildfire Institute to champion collaboration between scientists, stakeholders and policymakers in the use of quantitative data on wildfires to shape management efforts in the western United States.
Kelly Lytle Hernández and the Million Dollar Hoods Team
Led by Kelly Lytle Hernández and Danielle Dupuy, Million Dollar Hoods is a team of university and community-based researchers who document the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. Launched in 2016, the project began by mapping how much is spent per neighborhood on incarceration in Los Angeles County. The MDH maps have been used to advance policy and legislative change. The MDH project has also grown to deploy oral histories, archives, and rapid-response reporting to unmask how much mass incarceration has extracted from Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and working-class communities.
Thomas Smith
Thomas Smith is a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and founder of the UCLA Congo Basin Institute. As UCLA’s first foreign affiliate branch, the Congo Basin Institute works with organizations and the local government and communities to find solutions to environmental and developmental problems facing Central Africa. Smith is also the founding director of UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research, which has conducted research in 45 countries to understand biodiversity in the tropics.
