Lab Philosophy
Welcome to my open laboratory web-page. This is a simple, no frills platform that is intended to be well organized and content rich. It offers carefully curated information on social and research initiatives I'm involved with, giving access to techniques, tips, and data where possible. The website emphasizes a few key principles.
- Transdisciplinarity. A simple, but effective definition of this is academic research that meaningfully combines theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches from multiple disciplines to address and be informed by real-world problems.
- Practical Solutions. A lot of academic productivity is of limited use in terms of changing real-world practice. My view is that academia is improved in many (not all) cases where it focuses on practical applications designed to meaningfully optimize the human experience.
- Honoring Collaboration. Accomplishing transdiciplinary tasks in applied environments almost always requires collaborators. I take the view that any potential collaborator, regardless of rank is welcome and encouraged to engage. Many students who have worked with me over the past few years have gotten first author papers. I regard high school students as having as much potential input to my lab as senior professors - the contributions may differ, but enthusiasm and energy count for as much as knowledge and experience.
- Openness. I am at a point in my career where I don't need to hoard anything. In fact, the things that I care the most about are advanced by giving as much as possible "away". Thus, this website tries to make opportunities to collaborate open in a variety of ways, up to and including open data where possible (some of these features are still coming)
- Simplicity. This website does not spend much time on design, instead focusing primarily on raw presentation of information.
- Transactional Relationships. People often think of transactional relationships as a bad thing, and they can be. But done right, transactional collaboration builds a series of wins mutually held by both collaborators, and this gradually builds trust and often enduring relationships that extend well beyond their transactional base.
Theory
In the broadest senses, my research focuses on applying crisis theory to several areas, including mass disaster, mental health crisis events, and understanding extreme actions (heroics) taken to address crisis events.
Projects Summary
Veteran Reintegration. A great deal of my time and one of the areas I am the most passionate about is improving the reintegration of military veterans after their service and I've spent about the past decade working on community engaged strategies to improve veteran services after they return from duty.
Heroic Action. Most of human life is fairly mundane, but occasionally, we are placed in situations that require creative, daring action to preserve the lives of others or to uphold key principles. I've worked with several social psychologists since about 2003 on developing a better understanding of heroism.
Multiagency collaboration. Response to crisis events or disasters often requires multi-agency collaboration in order to effect control over the incident. I've used a variety of tools to examine this, including human-in-the-loop simulation and social (organizational) network analysis.
More information on major projects that I am working on can be found here.
Detailed information on research topics and subtopics where active research is happening can be found here.
Detailed information on research topics and subtopics where active research is happening can be found here.