What We Do
Digital health and social determinants of health innovation
We build community-academic partnerships that use data, AI, and applied analytics to align research, lived experience, and institutional capacity around shared public goals. By translating data into actionable insights with and for communities, we support evidence-informed decision-making, co-designed interventions, and practical solutions that improve outcomes while addressing structural and system-level challenges.
Our researchers develop and implement technological solutions to help communities adapt and thrive in the face of environmental, economic, and social challenges. Initiatives include bridging the digital divide, strengthening local health infrastructure, and supporting sustainable development through smart city innovations.
We examine how new technologies, particularly in healthcare, can affect privacy, equity, and societal well-being. Our work involves creating policy guidelines, proposing ethical frameworks, and ensuring that innovations are both effective and responsible.
Featured Project
Support evidence-informed understanding of urban systems in Baltimore.
The dashboard brings together publicly available data from city, state, and federal sources and presents it in an accessible, structured format to help policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and community stakeholders explore trends related to health, infrastructure, public services, and neighborhood conditions.
Featured Research
Project SAFE (Secure Analytics for Federated Evidence) is an applied research and innovation initiative focused on improving how sensitive data can be analyzed across organizations without requiring centralized data sharing. Many public-sector, health, and research collaborations depend on data that cannot easily be pooled due to privacy, security, legal, or governance constraints. As a result, organizations are often forced to rely on incomplete information, manual reporting, or delayed analyses when making decisions that affect policy, operations, or public wellbeing. Project SAFE explores technical and governance approaches that enable federated analysis, allowing participating organizations to generate shared insights while data remain under local control. The project examines methods such as privacy-preserving computation, standardized data schemas, and transparent governance frameworks to support responsible data collaboration.
Featured Research
Project SONAR is an applied research and intervention initiative focused on addressing economic, legal, and wellbeing disparities among justice-involved Black and Latino youth. The project integrates legal empowerment, entrepreneurship and workforce development, trauma-informed practices, and narrative restoration to support young people navigating reentry and system involvement. Rather than treating outcomes such as employment, mental health, or recidivism in isolation, Project SONAR examines how structural barriers and institutional interactions shape opportunity and long-term stability. SONAR combines community-engaged research with pilot interventions and mixed-methods evaluation to understand what supports more equitable and sustainable pathways for system-impacted youth. The project is designed to inform future program models, policy discussions, and applied research in justice, health, and social systems.