Abstract: The Federal response to dual use pathogens is being actively debated. We are at a critical juncture between free science exploration and government policy. Should science be regulated? We impede discovery and innovation at our peril. Yet, this issue must be viewed through the lens of the looming  infectious disease threat, globalization and its consequences, and environmental challenges such as climate change.

About the Speaker: Lucy Shapiro is a Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine where she holds the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Chair in Cancer Research and is the Director of Stanford’s Beckman Center for Molecular & Genetic Medicine. She is a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and is a member of the Board of Directors of Pacific Biosciences, Inc. She founded the anti-infectives discovery company, Anacor Pharmaceuticals, that was recently sold to Pfizer. She has co-founded a second company, Boragen LLC, providing novel antifungals for agriculture and the environment. Her studies of the control of the bacterial cell cycle and the establishment of cell fate has yielded fundamental insights into the living cell and garnered her multiple awards including the International Canadian Gairdner Award, the Abbott Lifetime Achievement Award, the Selman Waksman Award and the Horwitz Prize. In 2013 President Obama awarded her the US National Medal of Science. She is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Abstract: The interactions between biological and cultural processes are critical determinants of human health. Successful public health programs must therefore be based on a synthesis of biological and anthropological research. By disentangling the impacts of behavior and biology on human health, we can update health care objectives and practices. Human movements and shifts in settlements across short and long time scales can result in misallocated health care resources and inefficient response to crises. I develop methods to quantify changing human population sizes and distributions to improve resource allocation in both routine health care settings and crisis response. This ranges from assessing health care system capacity for stable populations to outbreak control through vaccination and rapid response following population-scale disruptions due to natural disasters or political instability. This approach is also valuable in informing predictive mathematical models of human interactions and demographics to provide insight into a broader spectrum of human health issues. Here, I demonstrate these concepts specifically for the transmission and prevention of infectious diseases and access to health care in low-income settings ranging from rural Africa to urban America. 

About the Speaker: Nita Bharti is a Branco Weiss Society in Science fellow with an interdisciplinary background in Biology (PhD) and Anthropology (MA). She is a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Woods Institute of the Environment with a research associate appointment in the Biology Department and Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State University. Her research integrates methods across social and natural sciences to identify and solve problems in human health, often in low-income settings. In addition to academic researchers across a wide variety of disciplines, her collaborators frequently include outreach and non-profit organizations as well as local authorities on public health and safety.

In 2006, the Chinese Government introduced a massive block grant program for rural compulsory education, similar to that of Title I grant in the United States. Central government provided block grants with add-on requirement to provincial governments based on total number of pupils, average per pupil spending in that province, and a cost-sharing plan that favors the economically backward provinces. Provincial governments then distributed the grants along with its own share to county government using a similar formula to cover school operating expenditures, free tuitions, and conditional cash transfers for boarding students.

While there have been plenty research on whether the program has buttressed the financing of rural education or crowded out local financing, little is known about its effects on the enrollment and education attainment of rural children after a decade  (Shi, 2012; Chyi & Zhou, 2014; Lü, 2014). This paper fills this glaring gap by using matched household survey data and county school expenditure data between 2000-2011 that were made available to researchers for the first time.

Our identification strategies are composed of three parts. First, we take advantage of the exogenous variation in the rates of cost-sharing in the two-step allocation process of the block grants to estimate “Intention to Treatment” effects of the whole program. Secondly, we compare counties receiving different proportion of subsidies from central government in a difference-in-difference framework. Thirdly, we use the IV-DID strategy that instruments the county-level education spending with the exogenous variation in the planned allocation of the grants.

Dr. Wei HA is currently Research Professor in Education Policy and Leadership at the Graduate School of Education and a faculty associate at the Institute of Education Economics at Peking University. Prior to joining the Peking University, he worked as policy specialists at UNICEF and UNDP for seven years in the United States and Africa. During his doctoral study at the Harvard University, he also served as a consultant at the World Bank. He has conducted research in a wide-range of fields including education economics, public health, migration, and development economics. His current research focuses on the impact evaluation of key national education policies in China such as the Rural Compulsory Education Finance Reform, and China’s efforts to build “World Class Universities” through the 211 and 985 Projects. He also examines the interaction between education and major social transformations in China such as the massive labor retrenchments at State-Owned Enterprises in the late 1990s and rising housing prices in urban China. Dr. Ha received a dual BA in Economics and Political Science and MA in Education Economics from Peking University and his PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University.

This event is cosponsored by the Rural Education Action Program (REAP).