News and Announcements

Dr. Mary Kopriva has joined ISER as an assistant professor of healthcare economics. At ISER, she is looking forward to analyzing questions about how economic policies can support women's and children’s health and promote health equity across the state. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Economics from the University of Oregon and her B.S. in Economics and Mathematics from Creighton University. Prior to working at ISER, she spent a year teaching English in Bulgaria as a Fulbright Fellow.

In recent years, ISER economists have studied various impacts the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend has on the state and its residents. Studies have looked at poverty, income inequality, birth rates, crime rates and more. Current studies are looking into the effects of the PFD on mortgage delinquency and maternal health.

Dr. Diane Hirshberg, Professor of Education, has been appointed Interim Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). Dr. Hirshberg is an 18-year veteran of UAA and ISER, and has served in leadership roles such as President of UAA’s faculty senate and advisor to the Chancellor on Arctic Research and Education. She was the founding director of the Center for Alaska Education Policy Research and is currently Vice-President Academic at the University of the Arctic.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $2.3 million dollars to a project team led by ISER researcher Dr. Jennifer Schmidt to assess fuel treatments as a strategy to reduce wildfire risk in the boreal forest of Alaska and western Canada. Of the total amount, $856,000 will go to the University of Alaska. Eleven researchers from the University of Alaska Anchorage, Northern Arizona University (NAU), the University of Colorado (UC), Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC), and the Wildfire Research Center (WiRē) will work on the four-year project, “Socio-ecological considerations for sustainAble Fuel treatments to Reduce wildfire Risk (SAFRR).”

ISER is currently looking for a new director, who will coordinate research activities both within the institute and with other institutions and agencies, and will supervise a multi-disciplinary team consisting of 30 people, including faculty, administrative and research staff, and student researchers.

When Linda Grant started working for the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) thirty years ago, she sat at the front door reception area. This week she retires from the role of fiscal officer, along with the accolade of Outstanding Staff Member of Year from the College of Business and Public Policy.

A team of researchers at UAA and UAF led by Dr. Dayna DeFeo will collaborate on a four-year project funded by the National Science Foundation to learn more about factors that contribute to retention of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) teachers in high-need schools. The project, “Sufficient COmpensation for Retention and Equity” (SCORE), will examine how compensation, working conditions and other factors encourage teachers to stay.

"Guidelines for Culturally-Responsive Reflective Practice in Birth – Five Settings" is a new publication developed to help early childhood educators reflect on culturally-responsive practices in order to identify strengths and areas for continuous improvement. They were developed collaboratively between Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC) and faculty from UAA’s Department of Psychology and Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) as a component of the “Improving Childcare Outcomes Research” project.

Advances in technology have made it no longer possible to achieve dueling mandates required of the Census Bureau, said Professor Matthew Berman in a recent presentation. It's not possible to protect individual privacy and provide accurate population counts. The Census Bureau is implementing a new strategy, "differential privacy," for the 2020 Census to protect individuals' privacy. This creates data that are not usable, said Berman, and 16 states have filed lawsuits against the Bureau so far.

The May 2021 issue of Nature Sustainability includes a paper co-authored by Jen Schmidt, Assistant Professor of Natural Resource Management and Policy at ISER. "Applying the food-energy-water nexus at a local scale" is part of a study that looks at the benefits of using a food-energy-water (FEW) nexus framework to understand factors that contribute to long-term sustainability and resilience in rural Alaska communities.