News and Announcements

ISER Center for Alaska Education Policy Research (CAEPR) Director Dayna DeFeo and Research Professionals Jessica Passini and Trang Tran provided findings from two separate evaluation projects at a statewide meeting of educators and education administrators.

ISER researchers Tobias Schwörer, Kevin Berry and Marie Lowe are part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers looking at how increased ocean acidification (OA) may impact Alaska salmon fisheries and adaptation measures available to fisheries stakeholders and policymakers. 

ISER Director Ralph Townsend and ISER faculty Diane Hirshberg provided information on school funding and the retention and turnover of teachers in Alaska at the February Alaska Municipal League (AML) Winter Legislative Meeting in Juneau. AML is an organization of cities, boroughs, and unified municipalities representing over 97% of Alaska residents.

Mouhcine Guettabi provided an economic overview and answered questions concerning the impact of the governor's proposed budget to members of the Alaska State Senate and House Finance Committees on Thursday, March 7. 

Mouhcine's presentation, Budget options: What are the short term effects?, is available for download.

ISER's Center for Alaska Education Policy Research (CAEPR) Director Dayna DeFeo presented to a national audience of teacher educators, higher education administrators, and policymakers on innovative ways that Network for Excellence in Teaching (NExT) survey data may be used to inform policy, practice, and cross-institutional collaboration. 

ISER’s Jennifer Schmidt gave presentations at the recent Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromso, Norway on the role of technology in remote Arctic communities and how harvesting wood for fuel impacts subsistence. 

Arctic Frontiers brings together academic researchers along with government and business decision makers to promote responsible and sustainable development of the Arctic. 

Within the first few weeks after the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) is paid, substance-abuse incidents increase, while property crime decreases. On an annual basis, however, changes in criminal activity associated with the payment are small and estimated costs are a small portion of the total payment, according to a new analysis of the PFD by Brett Watson, Mouhcine Guettabi, and Matthew Reimer of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). 

Reproduced with permission from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

 ISER’s Matt Reimer is co-author of a new paper on fisheries management released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 

ISER’s Kevin Berry and former ISER Director and Professor Emeritus Gunnar Knapp gave presentations at the annual University of Washington-Fisheries Research Institute meeting with Bristol Bay salmon processors in Seattle, Washington, January 18.

Construction spending in Alaska this year will be around $7.2 billion, up 10% from last year. Excluding an estimated $200 million in spending attributable to the 2018 earthquake, spending will be $7 billion, up 8% from last year. The increase is primarily due to an increase in petroleum spending which will grow 13% to $2.7 billion and national defense spending which will also grow 13% to $700 million.