February 2025

A Message from the Director

The School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University is a community of doers and dreamers, who think and act locally and globally.

The work of the Policy School—whether on urban resilience, social justice, climate change, multilateralism, or public service—remains more urgent than ever as we navigate a period of uncertainty. Our challenges are real, but so is our ability to respond with purpose and resilience.

I am proud of the work highlighted below, which captures how our faculty and students are helping to build a just, sustainable, and resilient world.

We will keep moving forward together.

Maria Ivanova

Director of the Policy School

ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE

Tapping into Improv to Spark Global Innovations

"Humanity is facing complex problems that are hard to tackle with science, technology or policy alone. Collaborative, interdisciplinary, and playful work can help us connect with each other in powerful ways to innovate in solution-building," says Prof. Moira Zellner. "I regularly use art, improv theater, and mindfulness in my computational and participatory modeling research, engagement, and teaching. These humanistic skills support a genuine, loving, non-judgmental, and fearless co-creative practice that produces more robust and novel insights for what must and could be done to make the world a better place for more of us. This is what motivated me to join Northeastern's Data Theatre Collaborative."

THEATRICAL ADAPTATION

Debiasing Law Enforcement Officers Through Theater

"Addressing gender-based violence is a complex challenge that requires innovative, out-of-the-box thinking," says Prof. Nishith Prakash."The first and most crucial step is training the first point of contact. This project, which focues on an expressive arts intervention, is especially close to my heart, as I had the privilege of working with the Bihar Police—whom I proudly call family. As the son of an officer from the prestigious Indian Police Service, it had always been my dream as a researcher to collaborate with law enforcement in India and gain a deeper understanding of the challenges they face in handling gender-based violence cases. When this opportunity came my way, it was truly a dream come true."

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Small Data, Big Solutions: Solving Complex Urban Problems One Block at a Time

"We have long known that 'neighborhoods matter' for health and well-being," says Prof. Dan O'Brien, author of the newly released The Pointillistic City (MIT Press), "but we have overlooked the many other scales that we live at—including streets within neighborhoods and even properties within streets—and how they each affect us. This is analogous to a pointillistic painting, which is organized into dots within objects and objects within a full image. This 'pointillistic perspective' has the practical value of surfacing microspatial inequities, or disparities between the people living in the same neighborhood. We often think of the dangers in and around urban areas in broad-brush ways. But such thinking limits our ability to prepare and respond in a way that solves—and anticipates—problems where they actually exist."

Photos by Matthew Modoono / Northeastern University

ADOLESCENT DRAMA

Empowering Teenagers through the Arts

"Soft skills are strongly predictive of success in the labor market," says Prof. Shantanu Khanna, who has collaborated on a project that uses theater-based techniques to help teens navigate their life choices. "Which pedagogical tools are most suitable for enhancing these skills for school-going adolescents, especially in low-income settings, remains an open question."

PLASTIC RAP

Countering Our Growing Plastic Footprint

"Plastic bottles generate enough waste annually to fill a line of 40-ton trucks stretching from New York to Bangkok," noted Policy School Director Maria Ivanova during her TEDx talk on The Plastic Paradox: Our Lasting Legacy. "91 percent of plastics is never recycled. We need collective action."

Watch the full talk

Photo courtesy of John Werner Photography

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School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

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