Kaye Husbands Fealing, Chair of the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Assessing Scientific Outcomes from Federal Funding of Food Safety Research: A Blended Bibliometric Approach

Abstract: The public value of federal research funding can be assessed by observing different types of outcomes, including publications. Using machine-automated techniques to characterize food safety, three questions are addressed: (1) Which food-safety areas represent the greatest pass-through of public funding to publication outputs? (2) What is the lag between research funding and publication of new technologies used in food safety sectors? (3) Are machine-automated approaches helpful in augmenting food-safety taxonomies? This study displays techniques to develop a comprehensive research taxonomy, and to forecast areas of research where federal funding can be productive in the communication of new knowledge to both researchers, practitioners and lawmakers. This is particularly important for a sector that is multidisciplinary and that spans sectors from food-to-fork.

Bio: Kaye Husbands Fealing is Chair of the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She specializes in science of science and innovation policy, the public value of research expenditures related to food safety, and the underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM fields and workforce. Prior to her position at Georgia Tech, Husbands Fealing was a professor in the Center for Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, a study director at the National Academy of Sciences from 2011-2014, and the William Brough professor of economics at Williams College, where she began her teaching career in 1989. She developed and was the inaugural program director for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program and co-chaired the Science of Science Policy Interagency Task Group, chartered by the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Policy Council. At NSF she also served as an economics program director. Husbands Fealing was a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Technology Policy and Industrial Development, where she conducted research on NAFTA’s impact on the Mexican and Canadian automotive industries, and research on strategic alliances between aircraft contractors and their subcontractors. Husbands Fealing was elected to the Executive Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (term 2017-2020) and named AAAS Fellow. She is the recipient of the 2017 Trailblazer Award from the National Medical Association Council on Concerns of Women Physicians. She serves on the National Institutes of Health National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council, the National Academies panels on Reengineering the Census Bureau’s Annual Economic Surveys, the Developing Indicators for Undergraduate STEM Education, a Council on Canadian Academies workshop steering committee, and an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Data Advisory Group. She is a board member for the Center for Organization Research and Design at Arizona State University, and for the Society for Economic Measurement. In recent years she served on several panels and committees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, NSF, and on AAAS committees, including the Nominations Committee for Social, Economic, and Political Sciences, the Dialog on Science, Ethics and Religion, and two terms on the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy. She also served on the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession. At Georgia Tech, she serves on the Institute for Data Engineering and Science Council and the Intellectual Property Advisory Board. Husbands Fealing holds a B.A. in mathematics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Host: Dana Randall, co-executive director, Institute for Data Engineering and Science; ADVANCE professor of computing, School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech.

---About the IDEaS Short Talks Series---
IDEaS is running a series of short talks (30 minutes each) that are designed to be accessible by a nonspecific audience of faculty, researchers and students who want to learn more about new areas. We run two unrelated topics back-to-back to keep things as broad and interesting as possible. Afterward there is a networking social to meet new people and enjoy a snack. You are welcome to attend the social even if you are not able to make it to one of the talks.
View both of the IDEaS short talks on March 16.