 All right, it looks like folks are hopping in. Hello, hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending where you're joining us from today. All right, we're gonna get started in just two seconds. All right, so welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you this month edition of the 2021 E4C seminar series. If you're new to the series, the series aims to intellectually develop the field of engineering for global development. We typically host a new research institution monthly or every other month to learn more about their work in advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development goals and global development broadly. Today's seminar will be presented by Dr. Arvin Ramon from the School of Mechanical Engineering, Materials Engineering at the College of Engineering at Purdue University. My name is Yana Aranda and I am the president of Engineering for Change and I'll be one of your moderators for today's seminar along with Dr. Jesse Austin Brennerman. The seminar you're participating in today will be archived on E4C site and of course in our YouTube channel. Both the URLs for those locations are available on the slide you're seeing now. Information on upcoming seminars is also available on E4C site, but E4C members will receive invitations to such seminars directly. If you have any questions, comments and recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C team at research and engineeringforchange.org. We also invite you to share your feedback at the end of the seminar to inform our strategy broadly and the link for the survey is listed on this slide. And if you are joining us today on Twitter, I welcome you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C seminars. Now, as I mentioned, this series is co-moderated and was launched by Dr. Jesse Austin Brennerman, who leads ASMEs, Engineering Global Development Research Committee. And you can see a little bit of his incredible pedigree on the slide in front of you now. He is currently an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, where he applies his really broad perspective to investigating the best ways to incorporate system level interactions between stakeholders in the emerging markets into the design decision making process. All right, so before we move on to our presenter and of course, to any question, I'd like to tell you a little bit about Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform and global community of more than 1 million engineers, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy solutions, access to information and digital divides and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and fellow leaders, a prior database of over a thousand central technologies in our solutions library, professional development resources and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships and more. E4C members also receive exclusive invitations to online and regional events and access to resources aligned to their interests. We invite you to visit our website to learn more about membership and we also invite you to learn more about our impact by visiting the URL listed on the slide. E4C's research work cuts across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good. Original research is conducted by Engineering for Change research fellows annually on behalf of our partners and sponsors and delivered as digestible reports on our platform with implementable insights. We invite you to visit our research page the URLs are listed on the slide to explore our field insights, research collaborations and review the state of engineering for global development, a compilation of academic programs and institutions offering training and research opportunities in the sector. If you have any research questions that you want to work with us on or research project that you'd like to pursue as a research fellow, please contact us at researchengineeringforchange.org. And in addition to that, E4C supports a broader portfolio of engineering global development initiatives at ASME. One such initiative is in fact, focused on hardware-led social innovation through ASME's hardware-led social innovation accelerator, iShow. Events are happening right now. We've wrapped up our regional events in India and Kenya just this week, but we do have iShow USA coming up in July and you are all very warmly invited to learn more about innovative hardware solutions advancing social and environmental impact from innovators around the world who'll be competing for a chance to join the iShow cohort for 2021. So do invite you to join us. The link is listed on the slide. Registration is entirely free and I assure you it will be time incredibly well spent. So with those introductions, we're eager to know who's on the line with us today and where you are joining us from today and give you a chance to engage and practice your Zoom skills. So we invite you now to go ahead and type in your location into our chat. So welcome, Alja. I'll check you guys off as well. I'm joining you all from Brooklyn this fine day. We have Indiana and Michigan. A lot of Indiana. I think we pulled in some folks from Purdue of course. Welcome from Colorado and Kenya, Frankfurt and Atlanta. Welcome, welcome. Great to see you here. Trinidad and Tobago. Oh, it's the first one for me from there, Boston. All right, welcome everyone. I keep typing your location. Just as a reminder, we encourage you to type in any remarks, any thing that you want to share with your fellow attendees into the chat. We will be taking questions in our Q&A tab and those will be exclusively for the presenter. We wanna encourage you to type those questions there so we don't lose track of them. But moving forward, I think everybody's got a good grip on what Zoom is having lived a Zoom existence for the past year and change with our pandemic affecting the way we work and live. So thank you again for joining us today. It's now my deep pleasure to welcome to the virtual stage, Dr. Arvin Ramon. Just a little bit of background on Arvin. He is the Robert W. Adams Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. His research focuses on excluding nonlinear dynamics for innovations in diverse interdisciplinary areas. He is the co-founder of the Shaw Family Global Innovation Lab that supports technology development and translation for sustainable development. And he has also the PI of the 70,000,000-year USAID-funded Laser Poll Center, which we'll be learning about more today jointly. Dr. Ramon secured funding from the NSF, NIH, NASA, and NSA, USAID, philanthropic donors and several industrial sponsors. He's an ASME fellow, an ASME Gustav Slarson Memorial Award recipient, and an NSF Career Awardee, very impressive individual with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, a Master's in Mechanical Engineering for Purdue University, and a BTEC in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He joined Purdue in 2000 and currently serves as the Executive Associate Dean of the Faculty and Staff in the College of Engineering. He has also served as Associate Dean for Global Engineering Programs in the Institute of Initiatives for Global Education, Research and Engagement in Latin America, Africa and East Asia. We are so honored to have Arvind join us today and take time out of his busy day. I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen now and Arvind invite you to share your slides for your talk. Over to you. Can you all see this? Okay. Well, thank you so much, Yana, for the introduction and to Jesse for, you know, inviting me as a part of this E4C seminar series. I'm personally, you know, super excited to see E4C engaging with the global development work coming out of ASME What better outcome could a life, such a long-term ASME member hope for? You know, I'm a mechanical engineer, been a part of ASME for a long time, love international development. And, you know, this is great, right? It's really like a home inside a home for me, so to speak. So really appreciate it. Thank you for the opportunity. I did want to preface, you know, before we get sort of started on this talk, I just wanted to point out that, you know, in my previous job before I, you know, started working on laser, very much, you know, my focus was like many people on the call, really on looking at engineering innovations, but more innovations of in things and technology-based solutions, you know, whether it's biomedical, something, or if it's a solar energy related something, you know, of course always driven by community-driven needs, scale up, you know, those kind of challenges. But that version of me, 1.0, was really focused on innovation of things. What this experience of laser has really brought to my attention is a lot more the realm of innovation needed in systems and in services also. And so I think the talk will be potentially slightly different from, it's not going to be based on, you know, design, you know, for development and so on. It's going to be much more systems engineering of large-scale systems to achieve certain goals. So with that preface, I wanted to start this off with reminding everyone of a brief snapshot. Roughly this is about a century of history of international development. It's important to look at the long arc of international development where it's, what we know as international development today, where it starts from and where it's going towards. So this is roughly a century, like I said, and as many of you know, the origins of the conditions that led to the need for international development, you know, pretty much go back to the industrial revolution and colonialism. You know, the two factors coinciding that led to massive inequities in the colonized countries. And then when that colonial structure started crumbling is when those inequities are really exposed, right? And so what you see is starting from the, you know, pre-1940 industrial revolution, colonialism collapse of colonialism is where the needs really become apparent to the world. The Second World War, in fact, is also a really important example of the collapse of that colonial structure. But it's really important to note that initial efforts were much more focused by NGOs. So, you know, Catholic belief services was actually created about a decade before the Second World War began to try and address some of these inequities that are emerging in some of the, in the global south, World Vision gets established. But the first example of US government intervention for international development is arguably the Marshall Plan. Post-war reconstruction in Europe, it was seen as being so incredibly successful that right after that, President Truman, shown here in this photo, and his inaugural address in 1949, quickly pivoted the Marshall Plan because post-World War II, the development landscape quickly shifted also to geopolitical rivalry, not unlike today. So it's funny that we're living the same situation today as well. But, you know, to the Cold War, it already started after the Second World War. And the US found itself competing basically in the global south as well in many ways. And so the first example of what we would know as a development, government-funded development program targeting Sub-Saharan Africa, you know, countries in the global south as opposed to Europe is really the point four program that President Truman started in 1949. President Kennedy then established USCID because as these programs were continuing it became obvious that you need to have, you know, permanent offices in the ground and so on. That's where USCID begins. As we go through the 20th century, many colonial structures continue to collapse. The 1960s sees the collapse of, you know, the colonial enterprise in Southeast Asia. And really it's from the, I want to say, killing fields of Cambodia in Southeast Asia that Mercy Corps emerges from there. Brack emerges from the chaos ensuing from Bangladesh's independence. But at the same time, we also see an increase in maternal child health issues, AIDS epidemic, the global health side sort of picks up a lot significantly here. So you see these NGOs getting started to really implement and the USCID starting to really work with these implementers to implement development programs. Gates Foundation, this is where, you know, more of the techie side is coming in, Millennium Development Goals. The U.S. Global Development Lab, you know, gets set up in 2013, 2014. That's changed now. It's called the Innovation Technology and Research Hub. And the Sustainable Development Goals, of course, 2015, which laid out the end of extreme poverty by 2030. By the way, at the rate at which things were going in 2015, this goal seemed very reasonable. In this situation, we have a monkey ranch thrown in the works called COVID-19, as you all know. And so this picture of a century long growth and trying to target the root causes of inequities in the global south then has led to really some new challenges the way I see it. I think there are three important things that have happened. I think many of you know that the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased the number of people living in extreme poverty in the world. I mean, there's significant increase per World Bank estimates. The World Food Program estimates, at least in the countries where they work in, that the number of people in extreme food insecurity has more than doubled. Global health now is going to remain a major concern, especially in the global south for a very long time. So you look at these three things and you go, oh my goodness, the work that needs to be done in development suddenly got, the lifting got a lot heavier. And it's not that it's going to be for a year. This will stay for a decade if not two to try and iron out. All the progress we were making from 2000 to 2015, the millennium development goals, a lot of it has been unraveled. And then all this is of course happening in the context of, you know, new geopolitics, new geopolitical realities. So the work has become a lot harder, a lot harder, and will for the next decade for international development. Yet the best is we can tell the budgets for global development, whether they come from the US government, whether they come from philanthropic donors, bilateral donors. As best as we can tell, it's probably not going to change a whole lot. So all of a sudden all of us in the development sector are going to have to do twice the lifting for the same amount of resources. So that is a huge challenge, but in challenge lies an opportunity in that one venue to really make sure that development programs, whether it's the USAID, whether it's the European Union, the Canadian Development Research Council, the USMAC, and other animal resources, the European Union, the United Nations, the U.S.��, the National Economic Cooperation Council. So if you're looking for both baby materials and also the philanthropic foundations as you do it, they're going to be pushed to become much more results in cost effective to accomplish larger goals. And you know, I argue that research and evidence based development is really what's needed to accompany you know, to be able to accomplish more for less. in the arc of, you know, century of development and looking forward for the next two decades, where I see in this significant being increased challenging environment for international development that this community, ASME, EU4C and the larger academic research committee can play a really important role. This transitions me to laser. So laser is pretty much set to try and work in this paradigm of how can we get research and evidence-based and data-driven information to really improve development outcomes of major development programs around the world. That's what this is for. So this is in some sense a pilot, which I don't think we had imagined COVID would hit, but the timing is great because we started doing this before COVID and I think this is gonna be at least one of the pillars by which the significant development challenges in the next two decades will actually be accomplished is using integrating research into practice and policy for development. So briefly about laser, it is a five-year cooperative agreement. We are roughly about in the midpoint of a five-year program. We have amazing consortium members. I wanted to highlight who they are. We have the Catholic Relief Services, which is one of the main implementers, one of the top, let's say five, 10 implementers that USCID contracts do for implementing programs. So amazing partnership with Catholic Relief Services, which we've been having for a long time that has led to partnerships in many technical sectors and then laser came along and they've really been a key partner for us to understand how the development business really works from a practitioner's point of view and helping us shape the interaction with practitioners and those implement programs, development programs of USCID and more. Indiana University of Notre Dame and between the three of us, Purdue, Indiana, Notre Dame, the three finest universities in the great state of Indiana, very complimentary skills, Indiana University, tremendous, tremendous strengths in policy, environment, global health, University of Notre Dame, tremendous strengths in monitoring knowledge and learning and social justice and so on. And then we have the Star University of Sub-Saharan Africa, at least of Uganda, Makeda University, just an incredible partner who had a lot of experience with a prior version of laser used to be called Higher Education Solutions Network 1.0 and they were a prime in that. And so they were a network. And so then in a sense, laser becomes a network of networks because by engaging Makeda University, we're able to really tap into their network of the resilient Africa network, it's called. As well as the tremendous experience they've had in implementing consortia networks and development innovation. So we brought this team together really fortunate and I have here, there are many, many people who make laser run and I can tell you it's not me who makes laser run, many other, everyone else makes laser run. But I have here a snapshot of a few of the individuals, some of the key personnel, Yomar Nyi, she's a professor in industrial engineering, just an outstanding colleague, a co-PI who's helping providing the academic leadership along with me to laser. And then we have Balabi Gupta, the program director, Betty Bogusu, the technical director, Chris Rice at Indiana University, who's really leading the effort at making sure our communication of research, the research products we think about and we think about how to make sure the research products have the influence they need to have in order to get the change we seek, then he's leading that effort from Indiana University, really fortunate to have Alexandra Towns from Catholic Relief Services, who's really taken a lead in thinking through the embedded research translation idea that I'll be talking about here in a bit. And Fred Rossi, who is our monitoring evaluation learning specialist at the University of Notre Dame. So all of us, this is the key personnel within laser. Let me talk briefly about what the charge and scope of laser is. USCID asked us to be ready to offer research assistance and services and award researcher and practitioner teams to be able to address research challenges in every USCID partner country, anywhere in the world. And they wanted us to be able to be able to deal with research challenges in any technical sector. And as you can tell, this is a huge challenge. Any regional focus, any technical sector, it's incredible. So we had to come up with some really interesting innovations to be able to be very adaptive, to be able to deal with this. Quick overview of what laser components are. There are five key components of laser. One is the network. And so we have a registered network of 2,600 plus researchers and practitioners from 61 USCID partner countries. And what's interesting about it is unlike ResearchGate, when you become a member, you actually provide data about yourself based on USCID or development sector interest focus. And you can also provide examples of the kind of research products you've done. So it's a very interesting niche set. If you want to find a researcher with a specific interest in a certain country, this is starting out to be the place to go for it. So this is a very interesting network and resource we have. A second piece is really trying to get at the upstream of what the research needs are. So laser is not, laser actually works with our donor, USCID entities and other stakeholders to try and get to the basis of, well, what is the fundamental place that we need to focus research efforts on? And of course we then fund them for it. And as we fund them, you know, because this is really about applied research leading to, you know, translation to policy or practice, we require in a research funding that implementers, whether they are NGOs, whether they are local government, whoever the partner is, really are integrated from the get-go. And we have a whole set of processes that ensures that that leads to really good outputs. Gender mainstreaming is a key part of laser pulse. We have, you know, online training. So people who apply for funding from laser pulse are required to take our gender mainstreaming online courses. And we monitor that, we track that. And so that's a key, really important thing in what we do. We try to make sure that a, you know, processes that a lot of our PIs, or we try to make sure that there's good gender representation in the PIs that we fund as well around the world. And we have a capacity strengthening piece where we work with our awardees and their teams to really strengthen and sustain their capacity for doing this sort of development research and translation for development. So these are the five main components of laser. We do two kinds of funding models. One is what we call core funding where we do these RFRED conferences in different parts of the world, the research or development conferences that are followed then by grant rounds in country. We issue a request for applications and fund them. What's been interesting here is that we have used our collective as a consortium. We have longstanding international partnerships. So every higher education institution has these partnerships in certain countries. And so we leverage that in a very significant way. And that's the reason why, for example, because of my career at the university, well, actually all the institutions in the consortium have an interest in East Africa. So we had East Africa, RFRED centering on Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania with focus on water, food security and primary education. We issued a RFA, getting researcher, practitioners, implementers together. They have to propose something and we help them along the way. We did one in Boatah in Colombia where the teams were the Venezuelan migration response integrated rural development and youth. Again, this is based on, in case of Purdue, we have a longstanding partnership in Colombia. So we're able to leverage that. Indiana University has very longstanding partnerships in Vietnam and in Ethiopia. And so they helped us really lead our engagement with those countries to come up with a request for applications there. In Vietnam, it's water and air pollution, private sector competitiveness, digital economy. In Ethiopia, it was a youth leadership in development and the measurement of resilience, which is a very interesting topic that was proposed. And then Notre Dame helped lead a grand research challenges for development round as well. There is one final round for those interested for requests for applications that we'll be doing out of laser and that's going to target minority serving institutions leading some of these teams to work on critical research challenges in the Global South. So this is how we do our core funding basically. The other side of the funding model is what we call buy-in funding. And that is an internal USAID terminology, but what it really refers to is through laser, we have access to any part of USAID, any mission bureau, institute or office can then fund research through us that they're interested in certain kinds of research. So they become, they themselves are the implementer practitioner and they're seeking direct input into a USAID program in that case. And so in that case, we work closely to refine what the research challenges is. Find the best research teams. Sometimes you do, you know, again, funding calls to try and get the best research teams and help them along the way for effective research translation. So through the buy-in funded research, we are funding about 14 different programs to the tune of I think more than about $24 million right now. And the work, the research work spans in about, I wanna say, 16, 17 countries where this is going on. I wanted to just highlight two examples of the kind of research we do through buy-in fundings. One is a cultural restoration program in Northern Iraq where the US government is interested in really looking at, you know, trying to restore the populations of some of the religious minorities that were uprooted during ISIS's reign of terror in Northern Iraq. And one of the practices that ISIS followed was really to target the, some of the religious, some of the agricultural underpinnings of the religious practices of those communities. So for example, you know, Yazidis might have then a certain practice with certain olive or olive oils or wine in their ceremonies or something. And then ISIS, you know, really the campaign targeted, it was agricide in some sense to try and get rid of the root of those practices as well. And so, you know, these communities are very dispersed and really to restore these communities, you know, the refugees who have fled elsewhere aren't just gonna come back because everything's been destroyed. The very basis of their cultural practices has been destroyed. So it requires an initial research where really working with refugee populations to try and identify what were those religious practices and how do they map on to agriculture? So this is really about cultural agriculture. So there's research that needs to be done to identify what those were. And then a second phase of the project is really to rebuild the capacity for sustaining that agriculture that supported the culture. And so this is a very significant major program. I'll talk a little bit more about it later. A second program is South Africa, a traffic in person. Very, very important program where we're partnering with the Department of Science and Innovation in South Africa and the USCID mission in South Africa. And this, when we started this buy-in project, the request came because South Africa at the time was, you know, was wanting to highlight its efforts at dealing with human trafficking as a part even of trying to, their membership into the OECD, for example. And so this was one of the key research topics that would help inform those efforts, make them more effective. But the real idea is to uncover through data what is the scale and scope of human trafficking in South Africa, which by the way, another sad outcome are authors that are PIs that we fund on this project in South Africa have determined that there's been a significant surge in human trafficking during the COVID-19 pandemic. So this is one more of those. It's a huge surge that has happened. And so it's gonna become, that's one more thing that's gonna become very hard to manage longer term. But this research is going on. It's very important to have research evidence data on the scale and scope of human trafficking in South Africa. So we partnered with DSI and the USCID mission there to do a call for proposal through the South African Academy of Sciences. And we got great teams assembled together that are working to really track this problem down. So these are examples of the very high impact, use of applied research to inform policy and practice. You can imagine, this is big, very big. So going back to laser components, I want to quick shine some light on the systems engineering that we need to do to put such a program together. I'll talk briefly about the identification of research needs and then talk a little more about embedded research translation after that. So identifying research questions, as I mentioned, this is part of the things we do before we issue a call for proposals. And just wanted to take you on a journey with me here. We decide we wanna do a call for proposals in Colombia based on partnerships we have. We know we can quickly bring many universities together to be able to do this. So we speak with a mission in Colombia that identify three broad themes in which they would like to see some research leading to translation, to practice and policy. One is the Venezuelan migration crisis there, another is integrated rural development, the other is youth, and they tell us go. And then we have to figure out, well, what questions should we pose for the research call? How do we figure all that out? I mean, these are huge topics. How do we do this? And so this is where, you know, Professor Joseph Seinfeld, who's the director, he's in civil engineering, but he's the director of our innovation and leadership studies program at Purdue, really a visionary and thought leader in the space of, you know, innovation science, broadly speaking. And so he and his group have developed something called the comprehensive success factors analysis, specifically for dealing with gaps in complex development challenges. And so this is a systems level approach that helps identify and isolate really, you know, what are the main gaps that prevent a successful development outcome? The reason is take any one of these challenges, Venezuelan migration crisis, let's say the development objective in your results framework or theory of changes to have a quick and safe integration of the refugee population into the host country. Let's say that's the overall goal. It's a hugely complex challenge because there are many, many, many pieces that need to be, there's no single silver bullet. There are many, many things that need to be in place for a successful outcome like that. So comprehensive success factors analysis, we'll talk a little bit about it, gets to really looking at these challenges, working with a whole bunch of stakeholders to identify, well, what are those factors on the ground that are really, there's a big gap in their implementation. And so if we were to do research, we want to focus our research there on places where the conditions on the ground are really not being met. So the research can help move the needle and have significant impact. I mean, you could do research in any of the different factors that are needed, right? But it's not going to have the impact. There's only limited resources. So he had to be wise and invest in places where research can move the needle on those places where the conditions on the ground are really not being met for some reason. So the main innovation science idea is that there is actually a method, a systems level analysis method, a systems engineering, if you will, that can identify these missing success factors systematically and it involves things like mining the published literature. So when it's only migration crisis, you do data mining, text mining, try to identify what are the different factors that need to be in place for it. I construct what are called issue trees after that. Consult with key stakeholders, experts in the field to try and refine those trees. Bring together stakeholders, practitioners, researchers to try and hash out which of those in those issue trees where the gaps really are. And so it's a very complicated process to really do all this properly. One of the things that Joe's research group has determined is that regardless of the development challenge you're looking at, there are roughly a set of 15 primary categories into which the success factors fall. Regardless, you could choose global health, you could choose, you know, Venezuelan migration crisis and you know, it's gonna be this. It's pretty amazing that they've determined this. And so broadly speaking, they come into what we would call operations bucket, participatory element, systems robustness, foundational elements like security, safety, policy, government leadership, right? And so what they do is, so let's say we have the Venezuelan migration crisis. What they would do is to do a lot of text mining to really understand what are all the different success factors that need to be in place, infrastructure, infrastructure for the intended beneficiaries. What are the different, quote unquote, infrastructure elements that need to be in place for a successful outcome? For those to be in place, what are some prerequisites for those things to happen? And how are they connected? You know, is doing one accomplishing another objective? So you create this interconnected trees of issues underlying each of these four, let's say the Venezuelan migration crisis effort. And once those trees are constructed, we send them to USAID, to NGO experts who work in these areas who tell us, hey, you're missing this, you're missing this in this tree, you know, you need to consider these things. Then we convene all of them for a research for development workshop, in this case in Columbia, to really hash out the details and based on votes and based on what they're doing to really push up which are the gaps which are not so much the gaps in the ground and we really have information on, well, this is what's missing on the ground. And then we, you know, publisher RFA in country to ask researchers and practitioners to team together to address those gaps. That's how we do this. And to give you a sense of how one of these programs works, I've got a little video here that Marilyn is going to help me play. It provides both the glimpse of how we are using a preexisting partnership between in this case Purdue in Columbia and how these R40 sort of hash it all out, you know, workshops work together. So over to you, Marilyn, if you can share that video, it's a quick three minute video. The laser pulse is another activity that has actually taken advantage of the partnership in Columbia. It's a very unique program and really tries to bring in researchers to engage with practitioners, implementers of development programs. And so there's been a very big increase in movement across many colleges, across many departments, really academic partnerships that have blossomed. So it's really nice to see this grassroots level impact of the academic partnerships as well as, you know, the big projects that come through by being top of mind as an academic partner to engage both the Colombian government and the US government in its efforts in Columbia. The comprehensive success factor process is really anchored in providing a system's view of the complex problems that we find in socio-technical or socio-political contexts. The core of the process is built on evidence of patterns that we've uncovered that occur in all of these problems, no matter where they are in the world that are anchored really in human behavior and in the context in which these challenges are faced. We found that there's roughly 15 to 16 major categories of problem areas that typically have to be covered that span from stakeholder engagement and leadership involvement through to resource provision for the actual solution to a problem, ultimately onto the adoption of measures that might be part of the solution and then techniques that are required for sustainability and resilience of the solution to be lasting over time. Yeah, a key element of these complex problems is that quite often they've been deemed to be intractable. And I think our work with the comprehensive success factor analysis demonstrates that they're intractable because they're extremely complicated, which makes it daunting, certainly, but the intent of this process is to raise those variables in the eyes of the people that are working on the problem. You start talking about numbers and you start talking about their issues and the problems behind politics. People get to understand each other and usually they find out they're closer in their positions that they thought they would be. So we had people from the government here, people from the academia and from implementer organizations. And even though they have some differences in how they approach things, once they start talking about the real issues and the real problems, they found common ground. There's been an incredibly diverse group of perspectives that have been incredibly rich in attacking these problems that are facing Columbia right now. And I think that's been one of the major strengths of WASER in this event and in the award itself. When we designed the laser award, the achievements that we wanted to have were to create a network of researchers that could address a wide variety of development problems to bring them together and create opportunities and identify the major development problems and questions that exist all around the world. And then to fund and to translate the research that can go into these problems and these questions that they were able to identify. Here in this event, it's been a microcosm of all four of those purposes. And that allowed us to, in very quick time, bring together the very first professional experts in these really interesting interdisciplinary areas where research can help in dealing, for example, the Venezuelan migration crisis, where it can help with the great rural development, where it can help with programs dedicated to youth. So it's the combination of getting together, high trust, knowing the system, bringing the best people together to get the best results that is gonna have the most impact on these populations, vulnerable and very poor populations both in Columbia and across the region. So it's a great win-win program here in Columbia. Thank you, Marilyn. So let me quick go back and try to wrap up here. Thank you. So that's an example of how we identify research needs and I'll briefly touch upon, I'm conscious of time, how we worry about embedded research translation. Our embedded research translation effort, once we identify the research problems we do issue an RFA in country. We require research teams to have implementation partners and once we make these awards we're really accompanying them in the journey to make sure that the research and practice are embedded right from the get-go rather than, hey, let's finish the research and then figure out how it translates. And so we call this approach embedded research translation so laser's definition of it is really that it's an interactive co-design process amongst academics, practitioners or the stakeholders in which research is intentionally applied to a development challenge. And again, this has been, I want to highlight a lot of the great work that Alex Towns, Laura Rittering at CRS and Chris Rice at IU have done to really think this through and take this generic approach and apply to all the funded research that laser funds to ensure effective translation for development practice. There are four parts to this. The process asks for the funded teams to think through what their partnership is, what their process is, what the products of the research are. How do you think about what products you want to go up for to have the impact you seek to the dissemination just because you have the products doesn't mean you don't think of how you're going to disseminate it to have the influence on the policy and the practice as well. So that's what we call embedded research translation. It's a wonderful effort. These are the four pillars we have defined. And, you know, let me quickly skip through this slide and just want to point out that one of the key things we've done is we've been able to do a systems engineering of the process needed regardless of what research team is trying to accomplish of guiding research or practitioners themes through guiding questions. We have many tools available to them that we have designed in laser pulse. It's called detailed implementation plans. So sorry to interrupt. Are you intending to share a slide right now because we're not seeing a slide? Oh, you might have pause sharing screen for the video. I'm so sorry. No, no, no worries. I didn't want to interrupt you. Yeah, go ahead there. Can you see? We can. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. So we have developed these tools that really allow researchers, practitioners to collaborate a way really think through these four pillars from the get go. Actually at that we require them to be thinking of this when they make their proposed their research work as well. And we kind of accompany them in the process, make sure they're making a lot of progress. So for example, in the Northern Iraq, you know, buy in that I told you about, we actually have a strategy workshop with the research teams. This is between Notre Dame University of DeHook, Indiana University, Stockholm Peace Research Institute and USAID, who is really the beneficiary, the translation partner in this case, and go through all these things and they work through all this and they realize, oh, yeah, we need to define these details. And it really provides a nice systems level engineering to ensure that people drink everything from the partnership, the process, the translation product isn't going to be briefs and reports, what assistance is needed to do briefs, technical briefs, et cetera, to training manuals. And we help them guide them towards what kinds of products they should be thinking for, for the impact they seek to have and how to disseminate them. So it's a very detailed process of embedded research translation and dissemination that we work on. That's one of the key things of our embedded research translation processes in laser. And, you know, the end, I want to again highlight some of the overall innovations in the systems engineering of laser that the researcher network, researcher practitioner network we have created based on development research expertise is really unique. It's pretty amazing. Comprehensive success factors approach to help upstream, help USAID and other development donors figure out, well, where is the research gap that we need to focus on? How do we implement an embedded research translation that ensures that most of the research is actually going to be used, there's going to be uptake and can there be intentionality behind it to make sure that it's taken up? And what we're working on now is really matchmaking algorithms. We've got a marketplace of development researches around the world. Can we suggest to people, hey, you know, our donor comes in, you know, make suggestion algorithms, for example, behind this, hey, maybe you want to partner with this person or something like that. So we're working on the systems level issues, but I just want to highlight some of these innovations that are needed to run something like this. So with that, I'd like to pause and thank you for your attention and would welcome any questions. Well, thank you very much, Aaron, for that both informative and I would say inspiring talk. I think this is a topic that's very close to a lot of things people have talked about before in our seminars. We've had some systems, engineering, people discuss, you know, sort of similar thoughts around what are these structural issues, you know, we can focus on the technology, we can focus on sort of these local design development things that we've done before, but it's not translating as you've talked about the impact. And so really thinking about what does it mean to have impact? What does it mean to be successful? We had a couple of questions and I would encourage people who are on the line here to write either in the Q&A, I'm going to try and synthesize some of those questions or in the chat where we'll be monitoring that, we'll put them in the Q&A so we can ask them to make sure we get your questions to him. But I have a lot of questions of my own, so I thought let me start with what's in the Q&A and then I have some questions for you. When one of the questions you have is you talked a lot about, you know, having these sort of larger teams, you're working with CRS, you're working with Catholic Relief Services, you're working with USID, you're working with a lot of people. So, where do you focus in terms of building that team? You talked about matchmaking at the end there, right? Who are sort of the major types of players that you are focusing on in terms of where the academic researchers fit into this larger picture of contributing to development practice, right? So, you know, who is in that matchmaking algorithm and who do you guys at the end do you focus on trying to connect together? Yeah, as I said, thank you. That's a really good question, Jesse. We've not yet implemented this sort of algorithms yet to, you know, we haven't done it yet. But it's going to be based on research. After all, this is laser and actually Euronews and her team, Priyanka, they're actually carrying out some very interesting research that tries to identify, you know, amongst all the funded research, tries to identify, you know, are there elements that might, you know, provide us some patterns about, you know, what are, you know, can you even predict what would be a successful partnership sort of a thing, right? I mean, you can do a very simple thing. There can be very simple algorithms based on, hey, you know, if you're interested in this region and this development sector, then perhaps these are the people. So that's very simple, like keyword based matching. But we're also looking at, you know, are there other ways to do this better? So there's some research going on and we hope to be able to finish that, wrap it up here in the next few months and use it potentially as a basis for doing recommendation engines. That's what we're trying to do is a recommendation engine really behind. But having said that, going back to, you know, are we trying to engineer certain partnerships? No, I mean, we do calls for proposals and, you know, research partners partner up with, you know, implementation partners and do it together. And one of the things we've tried doing recently is in the last round, we actually had the implementation partner and the research partners work through the systems level analysis on their own to before you propose what you want to do, walk through this to really be sure. Is this really what you want to do? Is that really the problem or is it something else? You know, so there's been another undercurrent and trying to democratize this process of systems level, you know, comprehensive success factors. And that alone has led to potentially leads to better partnerships because if you're not able to sort this out, you know, between yourselves, you're probably not going to be able to, you know, apply. So we've tried to keep it self-selection right now and, you know, it's at the selection stage it becomes apparent, you know, which research or partner teams are, you know, have it all thought out and those who don't, but we've also now tried to democratize the process so when they come together, they can work through this, you know, maybe to improve the partnership, but we don't recommend, you know, hey, maybe you should work with so and so. But on the network moving forward, we will be implementing some sort of a recommendation engine. So I'll let you know when that's done, but it's a good question. Yeah, thank you. So I'm going to switch gears a little bit just to build on your response. And I'm wondering how you guys, so a lot of the language here is taken from, you know, when you talk about embedded research translation, you're talking about innovation science, it's a lot like implementation science in ways with different focus, but a lot of the same language. Looking at critical success factors, you have the system, soft systems, analysis, and you talk about sort of evidence-based practice, right? So it's sort of like taking this evidence-based practice and then thinking about how do we do that knowledge translation into a particular context, right? Is what I was hearing, right? I don't know if that's, that's exactly, I don't want to speak for you, but that's what I was hearing. So I guess one of my questions is when we think about research and we're saying we need to do research, we need to have this sort of evidence that whatever this is works, you know, can potentially be successful when we're trying to translate it or develop that evidence. What, what does that evidence look like to you? Because I'm not sure that we have consensus. Or maybe I'm, let me not say that. Let me ask you, what do you see as like evidence of an evidence-based intervention or innovation for you? Like what is compelling to laser when you're looking to say is this evidence-based practice that we're trying to develop, right? Like Gates says you have to do an RCT for certain things, right? Like what is, what is it that you guys are looking at as evidence when you're looking at, you know, selecting among these different projects or thinking about whether something works or not. So we have, you know, how we ended up doing it is we have a peer review process where we have researchers and practitioners, you know, the top who look at the, the technical merit certainly, but also look at, you know, and we have our own team look at the, evaluate the translation side of it. Have they really taught this through or not? You know, to your point and your question about what we would consider to be, so it becomes, when you see these applications, you're able to see clearly how people are collecting the data. Many of them are doing quasi-experimental methods, you know, hypothesis-driven research. And so it becomes obvious what, I mean, the applications, the process has to address what is the research, what's the data, what's the evidence and how are you going to use it for the objective. So that's, it doesn't get passed even the first filter, if that's not, you know, minimum amount is not there. But in terms of what we look for, that even if people do exactly what they've written in the application, it may still not lead to good outcomes, because for us, it is the long-term impact, you know, we do want to be able to say that, hey, this policy brief was a key decision-making, you know, in the South African government's approach to dealing with, you know, human trafficking. So one of our challenges we face, actually it speaks very much to your point, is tracking, you know, the biggest impacts that happen through any of these programs are never secondary. Sometimes they're tertiary, quarter, you know, quaternary, you know, the report finds its way somewhere, somebody else picks it and somebody else, you know, conveys it to someone else, and then it appears, it takes a lot of digging to get to that point. What we do in laser is we're able to track, you know, outputs, we do secondary, we ask people, hey, watch the update of those outputs, you know, your video, and then the rest of it, it disappears. It's very hard and it takes, you know, calling up people, hey, whatever happened of it. So that is still somewhat elusive, but that's what I would consider ultimate impact is, you know, the approaches, all the projects we know have evidence-based, research-based, informed decision-making involved in them, but what difference did they make? What impact did they really make? That is an ongoing struggle for us, especially within two and a half years, sometimes impact might be a little longer, but it is something we don't have fully figured out yet. Thank you. You know, I think you were already speaking to my, to my next question, which was how are you guys thinking about impact and measuring it, given the sort of different time scales that you just brought up, right? So I guess one of the questions I have as a researcher in terms of you guys really have, it appears to me that you guys have thought a lot about this ecosystem of the researcher, the practitioner, the governments, these bigger systems, these sort of holistic way of identifying where are the leverage points that we can actually try and potentially have impact. So, you know, again, as an academic researcher myself and I'm trying to figure out, okay, like how do I plug in, I care about these outcomes, I care about having an impact, where do I plug in to try and myself identify these leverage points? You're offering us some tools to do that. I guess one of the questions I have is when we're thinking about that impact or measuring it and you're talking about, okay, like there's this longer time scale, maybe we have to, you know, call people or figure out how we even see these sort of knock on effects within the system. Is there, like within that ecosystem, how do we, how does that align or how do you guys square that with the researcher incentives and timelines, I guess, right? So my question would be, where do you, to take this to the next level, right? Like we really want to make an impact on poverty, right? Or sustainability. How do I as a researcher make sure that my work, when I've moved on to my next funding project, that my work is having that impact, that I'm having some feedback loop, I can close, right? So how have you guys taken that to say, how do we take those lessons and disseminate them back to ourselves, basically? Yeah, no, that's a really, really good question. And it also speaks to the scalars with the challenges, you know, the, you know, you know, we're funding 25 projects and, you know, within a year or more, we're going to be funding 30, 35, 40 projects, trying across all these researchers and embedded in multiple countries. And the scale, you know, at that point is impossible to deal with to track impact. So our strategy has been twofold. We've had a segmented strategy. One is there's an impact of this overall systems level approach that we're talking about, right? So there are actually the kind of people who are interested in the talk I gave or, you know, will tend to be maybe more, you know, other donor agencies and other networks that are interested in this. And so we have an approach, and I was talking to Yana about it just before this. So in addition to the standard theory of change and results framework, we also have an approach we have taken up, which is called outcome mapping. And outcome mapping is an approach where you are tracking your identifying from the get go, who are your boundary partners, who you plan to influence and your boundary partners. And you're, it's, you actually keep an outcome mapping journal, which all of us in the core team are know about. And, you know, make sure we try to update those things. Hey, I talked to so-and-so, the network call, they did this and you know, follow up. So we keep journal, we use an outcome mapping journal within our core team that allows us to see how the overall systems engineering approach that we're, you know, whether it's embedded research translation or success factors, how it's, you know, moving around and having an impact or influence on people. But the funded research itself, it's very hard for us to track. And so our strategy there has been, we empower them with the tools to make sure that they're successful from the get go. So all these tools for partnership, for impact, the feedback we've been getting from researchers is, wow, this is really neat. It's a really handy tool. In fact, when I'm going to be dealing with my next industry-based partnership, I'm going to be using those tools myself because it just, I mean, it doesn't guarantee because yes, after two years you'll be doing something else, but it sets the stage for, we hope, I don't have evidence for it yet, but it sets the stage for a more effective impact. But in the end of the day, those individual projects, it will be hard. Fortunately in the buy-ins, our main beneficiaries are actually within USCID themselves. So we know which offices to contact, you know, every quarter. Hey, you know, where did that go? How did that get used? But in many of the other funded projects where it's local, you know, governments and stuff, it may be harder to track the impact. That's the best. Yeah, no, no, that's really good. Okay. Yeah, so I have one last question that I'm going to hand it over to Yana, right? I believe in terms of, we are, we are quite over time. I mean, for those who want to stay, we do have unanswered questions in Q&A, but we are over time. Yeah, questions if people have some time, I can spend a few more minutes, no problem. Okay. Let me just ask this last one because I think it's so important. I'm going to, I'm going to rephrase it a little bit, but it is in the QA. So we'll get the direct one. So it was asking about sort of political differences between the different sort of member states. I mean, you are running sort of something that's funded by USAID, which has its own sort of position and, and within sort of a geopolitical framework. And you brought up politics and other stakeholder interests as part of the critical success factors. So I would frame this question as, you know, as a researcher, there are ideas and other disciplines around the positionality of the researcher, right? Like who are you as part of this stakeholder system that you yourself are studying, right? So when you go into a community, your identity facets of your identity or who you are, who your organization, your representing of the different stakeholders. The Q&A asked about trust between the different stakeholders and partners in the project in terms of different governments or NGOs and different governments. If you're coming in as Catholic Relief Services, depending on the country, maybe that's a different thing. I would really just frame it from the researcher side. You know, other disciplines spend a lot of time talking about the positionality of the researcher in terms of how it affects the results. I wonder how you guys think about the positionality of the researcher or any of the other, other stakeholders potentially biasing the outcomes or affecting the outcomes in some way. So that's my question. Not my question. I'm reframing it, but I think it's a great question. That's a really tough question. And there are actually many layers to the question, but maybe I'll start with the first layer on the positioning of USCID relative to, you know, country governments just within that. Let me just start with that framework. So as you, as you all probably know, USCID publishes country development strategies every five years for different countries. So that is basically USCID, the missions theory of change in results framework for implementing programs. It doesn't come with a budget or appropriations that not associated with it, but what you're going to be focusing on, why is all laid out. Those plans CDCS are always worked on with the local country government and they do always end up aligning with elements of the country's development strategy. So that's actually a very high level intergovernmental thing that happens in development of these country development plans that it has to line up. Otherwise you won't be allowed to operate in country if they don't line up, right? So we take the position that, hey, okay, the mission has its own country development strategy, which has been worked on with the country government. So we're working within a joint framework when you work, when you work on a USCID, when you submit a peer proposal or something to USCID, you're lining up the goals with the missions CDCS, you're effectively lining up with a bilateral agreement on, you know, what those development focuses should be. So in principle, there should not be any conflict coming from the identity of one, you know, USCID perspective versus local country perspective is really not there. Well, having said that, the other side of it is coming in as a researcher, coming in as a, you know, US university researcher. And even in country, the differences are very great. It's true. I mean, you know, there's no doubt that some of these perspectives are, in fact, we've also worried a little bit about, you know, lasers boundary partners don't explicitly include the local communities themselves. Right. So they include the implementers, the people who are implementing, whether they're local governments, implementing programs, we're getting researchers to partner with those implementers. But one of the gaps that comes in as well, what about the communities that the two together are trying to serve, you know, how does that come in? So the, there is no doubt that positioning of, you know, you come in as a researcher, you know, are you influencing the outcomes of the research or if it says researchers and implementers who are doing a program, is it missing? To what extent is it missing the voice of the community? Or are we assuming that the practitioners are so embedded in the community, they know everything about the community? Those are really good questions and we don't have an answer to them right now. It's a really good question, but no answer. Well, I think it was something of an answer. I mean, you know, even bringing it up and discussing it and having sort of those thoughts around, you know, what are we, what have we thought about, what stakeholders do we have sort of agreement on interests with and which ones do we not, right? I think that that's all, all very important. All right, I'm going to turn it over to Gianna since we're so far over time. We had so many great questions and answers. So please go ahead and wrap it up. I just want to personally thank you again for your work and time today. So I appreciate it. And Gianna, please wrap this up. No, thank you so much, Jesse. Thank you, Arvind. This is such a rich discussion that I think it could go on for many hours more, but we certainly won't do that as we've already had participants head out as we would see time. But thank you again for the insights. I think this is incredibly exciting. And the fact that the answers are not complete yet. I think it's a great opportunity to get a little bit of the work to be done and the necessary work to be done. So with that, I just wanted to thank everybody. I'd like to thank our attendees today. Any questions that were not answered. You know, we will try to address in some capacity, but we encourage you to reach out to us. Webinar is under for change.org or research at engineering for change.org if you want to continue to dialogue with our presenter and perhaps even raise some attention to your own around research subjects. With that, I wish you all a good afternoon, good evening, good morning, wherever you may be. And I look forward to seeing you on the next B4C seminar. Take care.