This presentation examines the barriers Michigan residents face in receiving governmental benefits such as Medicaid, SNAP, and SSI by analyzing publicly available data on application, approval, and churn rates. Using state and federal datasets and information on the design of programs, the study identifies patterns that signal administrative burden. The findings highlight structural barriers and how they shape access to essential safety‑net programs.

This study examines whether North Carolina census tracts with higher household broadband adoption also show higher labor force participation. The project is grounded in digital equity research, which treats broadband inequality as more than infrastructure availability and includes household adoption, affordability, digital skills, and the ability to use online systems for work. Using tract-level data from the American Community Survey, the study compares broadband adoption with labor force participation while accounting for poverty, educational attainment, age structure, race and ethnicity, and place-based differences across North Carolina communities. The analysis is designed to identify association rather than causation. This distinction is important because labor force participation is shaped by multiple structural factors, including local job markets, transportation access, education, health, and regional economic conditions. The central goal is to determine whether broadband adoption remains meaningfully associated with labor force participation after accounting for these contextual factors. By focusing on census tracts, the project highlights how digital inequality operates at the neighborhood level and how broadband adoption may relate to economic opportunity across rural, suburban, and urban communities. The findings are intended to contribute to policy discussions about digital equity, workforce development, and place-based inequality in North Carolina.

My two colleagues and I researched over a century of prefabricated housing to understand how standardized housing production has changed over time and how it continues to influence housing today. Our research focuses on historical and contemporary housing plans by investigating archival records of prefabricated housing and contemporary pre-approved housing plans. We compared these plans to better understand how housing has been designed and approved across different time periods. As communities across the United States continue to face housing shortage, our research is relevant following the recent bill of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which encourages faster and more efficient housing development. Working in collaboration with San Diego’s Policy and Innovation Center, our research team explores how the past can help inform today’s housing solutions. From this larger issue, my project aims to study labor economics and its relation to material technologies/systems in the production of prefabricated units, to gain a better understanding of how labor costs influence material choices and the design of pre-approved housing plans.

"Utah reports the nation's lowest SNAP participation (4.8%), yet its food insecurity rate is comparable to the national average. This gap points not to low need, but to a welfare architecture designed around employment as both a condition for assistance and a measure of program success. This study examines how Utah's One Door model, which consolidated workforce, healthcare, and food assistance programs into the Department of Workforce Services, structures access to assistance around employment. Intake, eligibility framing, and case resolution are organized around work status, making employment both the condition for assistance and the measure of program success. Using qualitative content analysis within a systems thinking framework, this study compares Utah's administrative records, legislative audits, and program outcome data against interview-based accounts of households cut off from assistance to evaluate whether the state's reported metrics correspond to durable self-sufficiency in the lived experience of former program participants. This research identifies a substantial gap between how the state categorizes program success and what is known about the post-exit circumstances of residents who leave workforce programs. Next steps involve building comparative models that pair Utah's administrative data, including case closure records, wage and employment outcomes, and TANF Maintenance of Effort accounting, against household-level evidence of food insecurity and help-seeking behavior outside state systems. Restructuring data the state already collects would allow direct comparison between reported program outcomes and the lived circumstances of the population those outcomes claim to describe, making the currently invisible measurement gap legible to public accountability."