Opening Ceremony: Remarks from NIJ Director Nancy La Vigne at the NIJ 2024 Research Conference

Good morning. We have an inside joke which is what will my walk on thank you the? Surprise me. Well done, Barry. Very well done. Welcome to all of you to the NIJ 2024 National Research Conference. We are so glad to have you here today. I would like to start with a land acknowledgment.(Land Acknowledgment)

My slides are gone.

Speaking of land, what a land this is. Pittsburgh rocks. How many of you are new to Pittsburgh. Let me see a show of hands. (Audio cutting in and out) talk about this great city and county. There is so much to see and do. Please do it outside of a conference hours. We want you here in this room learning from each other. I want to start think the NIJ staff here today. Those who have toiled for a year now developing the content and logistics. People that are fiercely committed to the Institute and we have grown our staff tremendously

And people that were on staff for two decades to those that just arrived, they are all fiercely committed to our mission. I never assume, speaking of mission, I want to share a little bit about who we are and somehow my mission slide -- we will talk about who is here. Who do we have in this room? It's a research conference see think we would all be researchers, but it's about half of us. Not even half of registrants that come from research institutes and academic settings. We have a lot of federal employees, as you would guess having planned on running this thing. About 20% or one in five are practitioners including people in state and local government. That is great because that is the point of the conference to get research into your hands so you can make differences on the grounds. We have a collection of advocates and Association representatives and consultants. That all-important other category, whenever you do a survey and there's the other category that cannot be defined. If you are part of the other category, come up and say hello and I want to know why you can't be defined.

About the mission of NIJ. I never assume people know who we are. I imagine some of you do, enough to be here today. I think it's important to underscore NIJ's purpose is to promote research, evaluation and technology development for the department of justice in the field at large. We do that by ceding research through grants and making sure the findings get in the hands of those that can make change on the ground and promote safety and justice.

NIJ does a lot of things and we cover a lot of topics. I won't go into all of them but you get an idea of the topics we covered by scanning the conference agenda. I want to talk about priorities that NIJ have and around the research process, not just around the topics we study. I think it is important to lean in and focus on these because they are embodied in the panels that you will be attending today. The first one is inclusive research. Letter shorthand for making sure we are engaging with stakeholders during the course of the research process. Engagement with people closest to the issue or the problem being studied. Its practitioners, police officers, probation officers, victim service providers. Is also the people experiencing victimization, those involved in the criminal justice system, they all matter. They are all generating the data and information we are using to guide our research and answer the research questions. It's vital we engage at the front as much as they can and bring findings back at the end to ground truth and understands whether we are getting it right and what the implications of the findings are -- (Audio cutting in and out)

Make no mistake not say that NIJ -- we understand the different research questions demand different answers and some will be more qualitative in nature and some quantitative. Even if it's the most quantitative study we expect you will take the time to bring the findings back to the people who helped generate it.

Closely related to research and engaging stakeholders is applying an equity land or racial equity lines. It's important and it's a criminal justice conference and we need to acknowledge how inextricably linked the credible justice system is in our country to the country's history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jim Crow enforcement, and all the conditions that said mass incarceration over the years. These are realities. We cannot shy away. These realities affect the research we do, the JW's, and even how we interpret findings.

We want to challenge the field to think about data that have biases baked into it. I'll give you one example. Arrest date of -- data to measure recidivism as an outcome, we know arrest data has its own bases baked into a pickup you are more likely to be arrested in the context of where you are policing or the color of your skin. We need to do better. I will take a break from priorities and share an announcement closely related to this issue of equity. About nine months ago NIJ invited proposals to stanza a center to enhance research capacity at minority serving institutions. I'm so pleased to announce that an award has been made to John J College of criminal Justice. A $1 million a year, for starters, to address the long history of disparity and access to federal research dollars that minority serving institutions, including HBCUs to build research capacity and create their own way of learning around pressing issues with crime and justice. This center will help bolster the research infrastructure and help them navigate the often Byzantine administrative burden of applying for a research grant as much as we at DOJ try to simplify things, I know we know how complicated it is to apply for funding. And just to create -- make it more competitive to build a community and pipeline of principal investigators. And John J college, the recipient is in its own right a minority serving institution and Hispanic serving institution. Having an institution like that that is successful and grants making can really be a good mentor institution for MSI across the country. Let's celebrate that, shall we?

Going back to key priorities I touched on earlier when discussing research and how you don't have to be qualitative or quantitative. We want to promote mixed methods in the research refunds but also think any research that's conducted in any space in issues of crime and justice, this mixed methods approach is important because we call it numbers plus narrative. Connecting with the narratives the more qualitative research helps us understand what we are studying empirically. It's vitally important when it comes to evaluation research. NIJ will no longer fund evaluations that don't include an implementation or process evaluation component. We think is highly important to understand what we are studying. Or if you had a randomized controlled study and find something doesn't work, we don't know what that means. We don't know if the concept didn't work or a failure of implementation. And one way to engage is to combine across disciplines and across people with different areas of -- expertise pickup picker lanes for good reasons. But if you partner with each other you can make for stronger research teams and that will yield stronger research.

And we are very committed to making sure that we get from evidence that is generated through our grantees to action in the field. We are calling this a research conference but half of you are not researchers, that is by design. Is an applied research conference, NIJ primarily focuses on the basic research that can help inform understanding of complex problems. We are in it because we want to make a change and a difference in the world and promote safety and justice. All that that requires for us to get from a journal article to changes in the fields and there's a huge golf in between. We know a lot about translating research findings to make them more accessible, we have been doing that well over the years but there still such a big gulf between that and getting the right people and practitioners and policymakers to hear about it, it is something they may want to learn and do differently to implement changes and importantly you have the capacity in the agencies and cultural foundations needed to make those changes.

The science of that is implementation science. We recently funded a request for proposals, the awards have not been announced, that will cede some research that helps us better understand how to get that from evidence to action. It's also a theme in the conference, this is what we want to do, focus on the findings and what they mean for policy and practice.

One weight we do that to try to get evidence out there is to crime solutions.gov. How many of you are familiar with that? I'd say about half of you. That's good, for those of you that don't know crime solutions.gov, it's a clearinghouse, basically does the hard work of sifting through all the studies and evaluations and only including those that are rigorous enough to called evidence. It takes the evidence and organizes it in ways that you can search by topic, program type and practice area and level of effectiveness. Crime solutions has been around for over 10 years and it's time for an overhaul and we been working really hard on that at NIJ and with our partners at ESG. The overhaul includes changing ratings by outcome rather than specific program area. We are in the process of trading folks to review everything that's in the clearinghouse that comports with the outcome focused rating. Changing the look and usability of the website. Recruiting new reviewers to have a more diverse array of reviewers that work on crime solutions and we have been doing a lot to communicate to the field. One of the things is making the rounds to all the conferences. Tomorrow at 1045 and 130 there's an opportunity for those, particularly who have a vested interest in crime solutions to come and listen and learn and share your own thoughts about crime solutions.

We have a great lineup of plenary's. I go to conferences and sometimes you go to the panel you are doing and maybe the panel your friend is doing. But you may skip the plenary's. You should not skip those. They are fantastic. We have a huge lineup. The one right after this, one that celebrates the 10th anniversary of our lead scholars program that stands for law enforcement advancing data and science.These are officers and some civilians that are housed in law enforcement agencies who want to learn more about how to do research on their own, partner with researchers, embrace data-driven decision-making and their agencies and they applied and were accepted and offered travel scholarships and training opportunities and a lot of networking opportunities. We pair them with researchers. We will hear from some of the early lead scholars and those that establish the program and celebrate the successes. I think you will find it very engage in.

We are lifting up NIJ's forensic research. We do so much in the forensic space has been one of the greatest joys of NIJ director. Not learning about what I already knew but the forensic science field and everything we are doing to help solve crimes and support victims. It's fascinating. We will lift up one part of our research portfolio and that is the part that supports the missing unidentified. Solving cold cases, using advanced technologies to identify people who have long been deceased and unidentified. It will be fascinating. Please come to that. And we are also celebrating the 30th anniversary of the violence against women act. It's amazing how this act has evolved and funded programs and substantial research and knowledge development. We will hear from many experts on that including colleagues, the director of the office for violence against women in my director Chris Rhodes who heads up the office for victims of crime. I hope you will take some time and come to these plenary's.

A little bit about how the conference is set up. It's actually arranged according to tracks. Five tracks total. The first embraces the evidence action spirit and highlights our grantees. Not just any grantee but those that have findings in hand. We talk about the findings and implementation for practice. For each session there are two evidence action tracks, those are NIJ. And building training and capacity. How to write a winning proposal. Learn more about our fellowship and research programs. How to best disseminate the research. Those are professional development type offerings. We talked about forensics and forensic team I put you front and center. We have a whole track dedicated to forensics in its own room to make it easy for you. To just hop in and stay in that room if you wish, although I hope you will sprinkle yourself around a little bit and learn from other panels as well. We have a track on inclusive research approaches being one of our lead priorities. Because we didn't want to focus on our grantees, we wanted to invite others to join the conference to bring new ideas. New this year we invited proposals for lightning rounds, submissions on emerging research topics and innovative methodology and data sources. These are organized generally somatically. But they will be pretty fast pace and you will see a lot of new faces and ideas. I invite you to join those as well. Just so you know you can use the app and we encourage you to do so. Who has not downloaded it yet? You are admitting. Download the app because you can filter it by track type and name and connect with each other. That super important.

We have our poster sessions. We had 113 people Senate posters we were only able to accept 50. We had a whole committee she review them and I think that you will be very impressed with what you see. About 58% of the posters are from grad students and it's a great way to learn from them and support them. I hope you will come to the poster session tomorrow afternoon, covers a variety of topics from corrections, reentry, drugs and crime, justice system reform, victims of crime and so forth.

I also want to lift up NIJ student travel scholarship program. Last year we had it and were able to award full freight coverage to come to the conference and listen and learn to 25 students. Accepted 25 students this year. But we had double the number of applicants. We had 385 applicants for 25 slots. These are the best and brightest. They come for graduate institutions and undergraduate institutions. And 40% come from minority serving institutions. Cover a variety of disciplines and, importantly, they are our future. If you are a student scholar, would you please stand up so we can acknowledge you? Thank you so much. At risk of embarrassing you I want people to know who you are so they can make you feel welcome. And they have a name tag ribbon that indicates they are a student scholar. If you are a veteran of these conferences make our student scholars feel welcome.

We have exhibit scholars new this year and they run the gamut of educational institutions and nonprofits and for-profit. They are at tables that surround the room where the poster session is. Please stop by and listen and learn from them as well.

In closing, I just want to invite you all to maximize your time here. I've been to a lot of these conferences, I will confess, I know what I often do. I go to panels or people I know are presenting. I go to panels on topics that I know something about. May be to learn something more, maybe I will ask a hard question because it's not what we are looking for here. We want you to attend a panel you know nothing about ago the topics are interconnected in some way. Try to meet new people. We like to hang out in clicks and reconnect with people we've known for years, but there's an opportunity to make new connections. Keep a running list of takeaways. Think about what you are bringing back to your home jurisdictions or your next research project. I mentioned to make the students feel welcome they are not just the scholars, there are other students here, try to make them feel welcome if you can identify them. Importantly, this is a research conference, people. That makes evaluation essential. And yet, last year our response rate for the assessment of the panel was not good. Not good at all. Come on, we need to learn, what would you like more of. That requires an evaluation form. There is a QR code that will come up at the end of each plenary and panel. I think you all know how to use a QR code. Please fill out the evaluation. They are really important to us. With that I will pivot.