Carolina MPA Calendar

• February 1-3: NCCCMA Winter Seminar, Winston-Salem, NC
• February 9: MPA Diversity Committee Authenticity in the Workplace virtual event, 12:15-1pm EST (details below)
• February 13-14: Wellbeing days for on-campus courses
• March 13-17: Spring Break for on-campus courses
• March 23: Registration opens for May term courses
• April 6-7: Wellbeing Day & Spring Holiday for on-campus courses
• April 9: End of January online courses
• May 1: beginning of May online courses
• May 9: End of Spring on-campus courses
• May 12-14: Spring Graduation Weekend
• July 30: end of May online classes

Join the MPA Diversity Committee on February 9th at 12:15 p.m. to discuss authenticity in the workplace with Erika Richmond from the UNC Civil Rights Center! Authenticity in the workplace is an important topic area and the Diversity Committee is excited to offer this event to students. For those attending, we will be raffling off prizes! To ensure you have the chance to win, make sure you are registered for the event by filling out the following form https://forms.office.com/r/YFHfH1e0Fb. This event is virtual, and the Zoom link can be found here https://unc.zoom.us/j/92612920964

Congratulations to Halle Bradshaw, Trevor Kinahan, and Jenna Kubiak for being selected to serve on the MPA Online Student Leadership Council. They were selected to represent the students who started the program in the Fall of 2022, and each submitted excellent applications outlining how they would serve their fellow students.

The Student Leadership Councils (SLC) for each format are councils of students who serve as the student's voice to program administrators. The mission and vision of the Online SLC can be found on the MPA Intranet. The online SLC can be reached at mpaatunc_SLC@sog.unc.edu.

Halle Bradshaw

New York, NY

Trevor Kinahan

Sanford, NC

Jenna Kubiak

Rockingham, NC

• February 3: Working with Developers
• February8: Graduate School Wellbeing Events
• February 9: Democracy Beyond Elections: Institutions in Crisis
• Register by February 10: 2023 North Carolina Education Datathon
• February 16:Showing, Q&A, & reception for Pushed Up the Mountain
• February 16: A Tar Heel in the Knesset
• Due February 17: Apply for teh 2023 Boka W. Hadzija Award for Distinguished University Service by a Graduate or Professional Student
• February 17: Tales of Empirical Science from City Hall to the Oval Office
• February 18: American Association of University Women Celebration
• February 22: NC Child Hunger Leaders Conference
• Due March 7: Join the Data Matters Short Course Series
• Applicants Needed for Chapel Hill Board of Adjustment and Planning Commission

Hope you are well and your semester is off to a good start!

This semester, I am organizing a speakers series: Planning in Practice. I wanted to extend a special invitation to any of your students in the MPA to the session we will have on Friday February 3^rd at 12pm. I am especially excited about this session because we will have a planner presenting alongside a developer about the nature of that working relationship. In my humble opinion, learning how to navigate that relationship is a valuable lesson for anyone going into public service. A summary of the talk is below!

Best, Sandra

Planning in Practice Speaker Series

February 3, 2023

12pm, New East 211

“Working with Developers”

Presenters:

Glenn Wynn, AICP, Planning Director, Shelby Township, MI (retired)

Greg Windlingland, Vice President of Land Development, Lombardo Companies

Local government has considerable power to regulate land development through the application of comprehensive plans and zoning regulation. They also influence land development patterns through the extension of public infrastructure such as utilities and roads.

Actual development of individual parcels of land, however, is typically accomplished by private land landowners and their representatives. There are two principal partners in this process: public and private. Each party comes to the table with specific objectives and outcomes in mind. The municipal planner’s goal is to use the land development process to implement the land use pattern envisioned by the comprehensive plan. The developer’s expectation is to make a profit and minimize the amount of time required to complete the project.

All too often, both parties look at this process as a zero sum game with one winner and one loser. This approach is neither desirable nor productive. This presentation will explore techniques for making the process more productive for both parties. The lessons have been refined over time through much trial and error. They offer practical, common sense techniques that may be broadly applicable to most communities.

Sandra Lazo de la Vega

On Thursday, February 9, the Honorable David Price will deliver the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Lecture on Public Policy, at 5:00 p.m. in Moeser Auditorium of Hill Hall. His topic is "Democracy Beyond Elections: Institutions in Crisis." This should be a very informative opportunity to hear his views on the current crisis of trust in U.S. institutions.

Representative Price recently retired after representing the Triangle area in Congress almost continuously since 1987, and has also published authoritative books on the Congressional experience as a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke. He is an unusually experienced and insightful observer of Congress and of American political institutions more generally.

The lecture is free and open to the public. It will be available by livestream at publicpolicy.unc.edu/lambeth-lectureship.

 The Graduate School and a number of other organizations (Student Wellness, CUAB, and Graduate and Professional Student Government) are hosting a well-being event for graduate and professional students on 2/8 at the Carolina Union.

This year, we’re modifying it a bit to have well-being-oriented events to actually engage with (including a relaxing room with Himalayan pink salt lamps, create-your-own essential oils, massage chairs, cookies and conversation, and therapy dogs in addition to a resource fair/symposium.

I am following up on our recent email about the 2023 North Carolina Education Datathon on March 6-7, 2023 at the StateView Hotel and Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center in Raleigh, NC. Would you be able to share this with your students who may be interested in joining us?

This free, two-day event will bring together student-led teams from across North Carolina to compete to turn publicly available data into actionable information to address inequities and improve educational outcomes. The winning teams will receive a prize and we will also provide a letter of excusal to students who need to miss class to participate. As a reminder, students are invited to bring a team of up to five people to participate in the Datathon. Space is limited, so we encourage teams to register early.

The registration deadline is 5:00 PM ET on Friday, February 10th, 2023.

This year’s theme is Ensuring Student Access to Out-of-School Resources and Supports. While students across North Carolina experienced declines in academic achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic, gaps widened between Black, Hispanic, and American Indian students and white and Asian students and between students from low-income and more affluent communities. Relatedly, while we know that student access to out-of-school resources and supports is important for academic achievement, students and families have unequal access to these services. As North Carolina aims to support learning recovery and ensure that students are supported to current and future success, it is crucial to determine where students lack access to vital resources and supports that impact learning outside of the classroom.

Teams will spend two days using datasets to create applications, dashboards, and/or other data visualization tools that leverage the data to reveal key findings related to the problem, then will present their projects to a panel of expert judges and conference attendees.

If you have any questions or need more information, please reach out to Robel Kelkile, K-12 Policy Analyst, at rkelkile@hunt-institute.org.

The Department of Communication in collaboration with the Carolina Asia Center invites you to the North Carolina premiere of Pushed Up The Mountain, a film by our very own associate professor, Julia Haslett, as part of our Faculty Spotlight series. The screening, Q&A, and reception will take place on February 16th from 5:30pm to 8:00pm in the Nelson Mandela Auditorium of the FedEx Global Education Center, 301 Pittsboro Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516. This event is free and open to the public. More details about the event can be found below as well as on our website. Please share this event information to faculty, staff and students that may be interested in attending.

About The Film

Pushed Up The Mountain is a poetic and personal film about plants and the people who care for them. Through the tale of the migrating rhododendron, now endangered in its native China, the film reveals how high the stakes are for all living organisms in this time of unprecedented destruction of the natural world. Beginning in the Scottish Highlands, the film travels between conservationists in Scotland and China who devote their lives to the rhododendron’s survival. Patiently observed footage of conservationists at work combines with centuries-old landscape paintings and the filmmaker’s speculative voice to create a thought-provoking film about human efforts to protect nature for and from ourselves.

About The Filmmaker

Julia Haslett is a British-American filmmaker who makes expressionistic documentaries on contemporary and historical subjects. Her first feature, An Encounter with Simone Weil, premiered at IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), won the Special Founders Prize at Michael Moore's Traverse City Film Festival, and was a New York magazine Critic's Pick. She is producer/director of the highly acclaimed Worlds Apart series about cross-cultural medicine, and producer of the companion documentary Hold Your Breath (PBS). She got her start at WGBH-Boston (PBS), worked for the Discovery Channel and was a Filmmaker-in-Residence at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics.

A TAR HEEL IN THE KNESSET: MAKING SENSE OF ISRAEL’S TUMULTUOUS PARLIAMENT WITH ALON TAL

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16 AT 7:00PM

Hitchcock Room, Stone Center, 150 South Road, UNC-Chapel Hill

Community member RSVP link:

"A Tar Heel in the Knesset: Making sense of Israel’s tumultuous parliament with Alon Tal" (google.com)

RSVP for students:

Alon Tal: A Tar Heel In The Knesset: Thursday, February 16: 7:00pm - 9:00pm at the Stone Center

Title: 

Tales of Empirical Science from City Hall to the Oval Office

Talk Synopsis:

There is currently a unique attempt, emerging from within government itself, to weave scientific insights and empirical methods into the fabric of day-to-day governance. This talk will first provide an overview of recent efforts at the federal and state levels (including in North Carolina specifically), and then we’ll dive into illustrative projects (e.g. a randomized controlled trial of nurse-led triage within a 911 system, and efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic) that showcase how to practically design and deploy rigorous research that informs public policy. 

About David:

David Yokum, JD, PhD is Director of The Policy Lab at Brown University and North Carolina’s Chief Scientist in the Office of State Budget & Management. He was previously the founding director of The Lab @ DC in the D.C. Mayor’s Office and, before that, a founding member of the White House’s Social & Behavioral Sciences Team and inaugural director of the U.S. Office of Evaluation Sciences. David’s work—from the world’s largest field experiment of a police body-worn camera program, to building algorithms that predict the location of rats, to a Form-a-Palooza initiative systematically re-designing all government forms—has been published in diverse outlets (e.g. Nature, PNAS, Health Affairs), received widespread media coverage (front-page New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, etc.), and impacted individuals and communities across the country. Over 100 field experiments have now been completed under The Policy Lab, The Lab @ DC, and the Office of Evaluation Science. David lives in Chatham County, NC with his wife, Sara, and their two boys, Ethan and Aaron.

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Above is a flyer about a free program by zoom featuring young scholars and their research and or community action projects. They all won American association of University Women fellowships this year and they live in the Triangle.

Please join us for a scintillating morning of research findings and community project results.

Registration is required, but it is free. All are welcome. Please join us.

Zoom Registration:

AAUW is a nonprofit, non partisan group which raises money for fellowships and advocates for women. For more information contact Michele Hoyman. hoyman@unc.edu

The National Consortium for Data Science, in partnership with RENCI and the Odum Institute, is hosting its springtime iteration of the Data Matters short-course series, virtually from March 13 - 16, 2023 — during UNC Spring Break. It’s a great way for someone to learn new skills and expand their knowledge on a subject as they apply for internships, jobs and promotions. 

Data Matters: Spring Ahead | Virtual | March 13 - 16, 2023

Data Matters™ is a week-long series of one and two-day courses aimed at students and professionals in business, research, and government. The short course series is sponsored by the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, the National Consortium for Data Science, and RENCI. Our first-ever springtime series, Data Matters: Spring Ahead, will feature a selection of our most popular two-day courses. Learn more on their website. 

Among the classes available are:

• Introduction to Effective Information Visualization, Eric Monson. Visualization is a powerful way to reveal patterns in data, attract attention, and get your message across to an audience quickly and clearly. However, there are many steps in that journey from information to influence, and many questions – what visualization tools to use, how to get data into the right format, and which choices to make when putting it all together to tell your story? This course will quickly walk participants through a wide variety of data and chart types to help even beginners feel comfortable embarking on a new visualization project.
• Visualization for Data Science in R, Angela Zoss. Data science skills are increasingly important for research and industry projects. With complex data science projects, however, come complex needs for understanding and communicating analysis processes and results. Ultimately, an analyst’s data science toolbox is incomplete without visualization skills. Incorporating effective visualizations directly into the analysis tool you are using can facilitate quick data exploration, streamline your research process, and improve the reproducibility of your research. This course is designed for two audiences: experienced visualization designers looking to apply open data science techniques to their work, and data science professionals who have limited experience with visualization.

• Basics of R for Data Science and Statistics, Justin Post. This course introduces participants to discrete choice models, econometric models of how people choose between discrete outcomes, such as mode of travel to work or type of treatment for pain. The course will cover the subset of discrete choice models known as random utility models. These models are often used in disciplines such as economics, transportation, and public health. No prior knowledge is expected, and the course will cover logistic regression, multinomial logistic regression, and nested logistic regression. Hands-on exercises will be conducted in R. 

• Introduction to Python, Laura Tateosian. Python is a consistently top ranking programming language. Python syntax is easy to learn and the language is well-suited for rapid data exploration, as well as larger data science projects. This course will help you add basic Python skills to your data science tool belt, so that you can then go on to explore some of the vast number of libraries written in Python. Learning Python is important for any aspiring data scientist. This course is designed for students with some prior exposure to computer programming, but no Python experience. Participants will be introduced to core Python elements for working with data.

The deadline for registration is March 8 for Monday/Tuesday courses and March 9 for Wednesday/Thursday courses.

Please let me know if you have any questions or if you need any additional information.

Best,

Jayasree