ACA DE M Y I N T H E P U B L I C S Q U A R E
Public Exchange Explained TM
Today’s way of life would not exist without the contributions of creative scholars pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Public Exchange™, an initiative headquartered at USC Dornsife, is designed to reinvigorate collaboration between the university research community and public and private sector leaders. Conceived by USC Dornsife Dean Amber D. Miller, Public Exchange officially launched in 2020. The first-of-its-kind office streamlines access to subject experts, enabling partners beyond the university to tap a dizzying range of expertise when grappling with complex problems — in a way that’s easy to navigate and affordable. “Public Exchange provides the connective tissue that not only identifies appropriate expertise within the university to solve a particular problem, but also takes care of the contracts, project management and other hurdles that have traditionally made collaboration with researchers challenging,” Miller says.
VISION INTO ACTION Miller’s experience serving as chief science officer to the NYPD for two years while she was an experimental astrophysicist at Columbia University gave her the idea for a new way of bringing academic expertise to bear on practical problems. But it wasn’t until 2016, when she was appointed dean of USC Dornsife, that she was able to put her vision into action. “The most relevant challenges affecting society are tremendously complex,” Miller says. “In addition to scientific innovation, research universities can provide insights from fields such as history, psychology, political science, economics and spatial science.” 12
WHAT IS PUBLIC EXCHANGETM?
We connect our partners with USC researchers.
We make it simple and fast to access deep expertise across many fields.
We define the scope and keep the project on track. publicexchange.usc.edu
FUTURE OF CITIES USC URBAN TREES INITIATIVE
90,000+ The number of trees the city of Los Angeles aims to plant citywide under L.A.’s Green New Deal.
Led by Public ExchangeTM, the USC Urban Trees Initiative is a partnership between USC Dornsife and the city of Los Angeles that provides a science-based approach to guide the growth of an urban forest of shade trees in communities vulnerable to heat waves and air pollution in a warming global climate. “The data generated by our team will provide a detailed scientific road map to help the city and the community plant an urban forest that maximizes benefits to our environment and human health,” says Kate Weber, director of Public Exchange.
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PUBLIC HEALTH THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON FOOD INSECURITY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY Under a strategic partnership with the Los Angeles County Emergency Food Security Branch, Public ExchangeTM assembled a team of researchers to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food insecurity in Los Angeles County.
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low-income households remained food insecure in 2021, and racial and gender inequalities in food security persist.
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Public ExchangeTM also partnered with Yelp to integrate novel data sources and paint a better picture of the resiliency and failures of the local food system in L.A. County.
17%
The increase in food outlet closures during the pandemic, revealed by Yelp data. The impact of closures in under-resourced neighborhoods could be detrimental to food and nutrition security levels.
ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF CLIMATE CHANGE TERMINOLOGY In partnership with the United Nations Foundation, Public ExchangeTM assembled a team of behavioral scientists and qualitative interviewers to determine how well non-scientists understand climate change terminology. Study participants were asked to rate how easy or hard it was to understand eight terms drawn from publicly available reports written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. People thought many of the terms were too complex and did not always understand them in the context of climate change. “Scientists need to replace jargon with everyday language to be understood by a lay audience,” says Wändi Bruine de Bruin, the study’s lead author and Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Sciences at USC Dornsife and USC Price School of Public Policy. “In several cases, the respondents proposed simple, elegant alternatives to existing language. It reminded us that, even though climate change may be a complex issue, there is no need to make it even more complex by using complicated words.”
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