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Northeastern’s Beltway insiders

Photo of the Capitol Building at night

CSSH Assistant Professor Dan O'Brien was one of several Northeastern faculty, students, and staff who recently participated in three separate White House events.

Over a recent six-​​day span, North­eastern stu­dents, fac­ulty, and staff par­tic­i­pated in three sep­a­rate White House events that rec­og­nized con­tri­bu­tions made in the areas of net­work part­ner­ships, inter­faith ser­vice, and HIV andAIDS aware­ness advocacy.

White House Smart Cities Forum

Daniel T. O’Brien, an assis­tant pro­fessor who holds joint appoint­ments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the School of Crim­i­nology and Crim­inal Jus­tice, and Phil He, asso­ciate vice provost for grad­uate edu­ca­tion, attended the White House Smart Cities Forum on Monday.

The pair rep­re­sented the city of Boston and the Boston Area Research Initiative’s new part­ner­ship with the MetroLab Net­work. The net­work was recently cre­ated to con­vene com­mu­ni­ties and their respec­tive col­leges to work on the research and devel­op­ment of tools that will address urban areas’ most pressing needs.

The MetroLab Net­work will be a spe­cial oppor­tu­nity for the city-​​university col­lab­o­ra­tions being under­taken by the Boston Area Research Ini­tia­tive and the city of Boston, including many involving fac­ulty at North­eastern, to ben­efit from sim­ilar work being done in other cities,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien, who is the BARI’s research director, is the Boston aca­d­emic com­mu­nity rep­re­sen­ta­tive on the MetroLab Network’s exec­u­tive com­mittee. His research involves using Big Data—most often in the form of large admin­is­tra­tive data sets gen­er­ated by city government—in con­junc­tion with tra­di­tional method­olo­gies to explore the behav­ioral and social dynamics of urban neighborhoods.

North­eastern is among the 25 national uni­ver­si­ties that are founding mem­bers of the MetroLab Network.

President’s Inter­faith and Com­mu­nity Ser­vice Campus Chal­lenge Fall Gathering

Stu­dents and staff in Northeastern’s Center for Spir­i­tu­ality, Dia­logue, and Ser­vice par­tic­i­pated in the President’s Inter­faith and Com­mu­nity Ser­vice Campus Chal­lenge Fall Gath­ering on Sept. 10–11. The stu­dents played a par­tic­u­larly impor­tant role, pre­senting a panel titled “Race and Reli­gion: Stu­dents Respond through Dia­logue and Action.”

Joined by their peers from the Uni­ver­sity of North Florida, the stu­dents shared exam­ples of how to respond com­pas­sion­ately and con­struc­tively to events such as the Boston Marathon bomb­ings and the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

At the con­fer­ence, North­eastern was also named to Pres­i­dent Obama’s Inter­faith Com­mu­nity Ser­vice Honor Roll.

It was an honor to be selected to present, as well as to receive honor roll recog­ni­tion,” Alexander Lev­ering Kern, exec­u­tive director of the CSDS, said in an email announcing the recognition.

CARE Act anniversary

Jean McGuire, pro­fessor of the prac­tice in the Depart­ment of Health Sci­ences in the Bouvé Col­lege of Health Sci­ences, spoke at a Sept. 9 White House event cel­e­brating the 25th anniver­sary of the signing of the Ryan White Com­pre­hen­sive AIDS Resources Emer­gency Act.

McGuire served as the exec­u­tive director of the AIDS Action Council when theCARE Act was signed into law on Aug. 18, 1990. At the time she worked to con­vene a diverse polit­ical coali­tion that suc­ceeded in pushing Con­gress to pass the land­mark legislation.

The council con­sid­ered the CARE Act a major suc­cess,” recalled McGuire. “It has saved many lives and built a care delivery infra­struc­ture and clin­ical capacity that has endured.”

The CARE Act cre­ated the Ryan White HIV/​AIDS Pro­gram, which cur­rently pro­vides drugs and sup­port ser­vices to more than 500,000 people who do not have the finan­cial resources to manage the disease.

-By Joe O’Connell

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