Polis Center Faculty Fellows Program

Background

The Polis Center is a research center in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at Indianapolis. The center works with community partners in Indiana and beyond to develop innovative place-based policies and practices for healthier and more resilient communities. It supports community development and quality-of-life efforts, natural disaster resiliency, and population health management using geospatial technologies to integrate, manage, and visualize the rapidly growing information on the places where we live and work.

The SAVI database Polis Center hosts is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive community information system, developed to help people and organizations make data-informed decisions.

Luddy faculty can take advantage of Polis Center staff expertise and the SAVI database to help build community applications in their research projects. Polis Center, on the other hand, can leverage Luddy faculty expertise and research labs to elevate Polis research profile and diversify its funding sources.

The integration of The Polis Center with Luddy academic and research programs is a critical theme in a recent external review of the center. The Polis Center Faculty Fellow Program is designed to help accelerate his integration process and build strong ties between Polis and the rest of the Luddy academic and research programs.

Program Outline

The Polis Center Faculty Fellow Program is a two-year program. Any tenured or tenure-track faculty within Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indianapolis can apply to become a Polis Center faculty fellow. The faculty fellow will play an advisory role in the center and is expected to participate in regular Polis Center meetings and major activities.

We expect the faculty fellow to carry out a collaborative research project with the center during the two-year program period. To help with the collaboration, the Associate Dean for Research office will provide seed funding to support this effort. This includes:

1. a one-time $5,000 award for project-related expenses to the faculty fellow (in a research account) and
2. funding to cover a portion of Polis staff time to work with the fellow. We expect to support up to 3 new faculty fellows each year.

The expectation of a Polis Faculty Fellow is that the collaboration will generate competitive external research funding applications by the end of the fellowship, and will form a strong foundation for a long-term, productive research collaboration.

Application Process

Interested faculty should submit a 1-2 page application to the Associate Dean for Research office. The application should state your interest in building collaborations with Polis Center and describe the intended collaborative project as well as expected future external funding sources.

Applicants are encouraged to discuss their ideas with the center’s director of collaborative research, Karen Comer, in advance of a submission to discuss ideas, brainstorm an approach, and determine if and how the center can support the proposed collaborative research project.

The application will be on a rolling basis. For each application, you should expect a decision within 2-3 weeks.

What Polis offers

1. A community research infrastructure that includes:
   • Technology, data, and experts to manage and democratize data about communities, populations, and issue areas
   • Data assets:
     • Contextual Data: Social determinants, demographics, climate data; neighborhood histories, historical image collections, etc.
     • Spatial Infrastructure Data: Detailed geospatial basemaps for 92 counties in Indiana – administrative, political, and census boundaries; parcels; point addresses; centerlines; hydrography; transportation infrastructure; etc.
     • Domain-specific Data: Population health, social assets, mitigation strategies, risk and impact of natural disasters, poverty and financial stability, equity, social justice, and more
     • Data Partnerships: Data agreements and relationships with State of Indiana, counties, federal agencies, City of Indianapolis, Regenstrief Institute, nonprofits, and more
     • Secure Data Environment: Developed with guidance from IU’s privacy and security officers, IRB, legal team, and UITS, this allows us to manage and link personally identifiable data.
   • Professionals knowledgeable about how to leverage and repurpose data, the local community, policies, geospatial analysis methods, analysis of complex community issues, and more.
   • A sandbox to build and test innovative applications of AI, ML, and other informatics solutions with a large data resources for real-world applicability to a variety of societal issues.
2. Help selecting population and community metrics relevant to the research at hand
3. Ability to define creative new population and community metrics
4. Knowledge of and ability to identify secondary data sources
5. Creative geospatial thinking and geospatial analysis
6. The ability to visualize data for use by a variety of audiences, and the ability to build custom data analysis, visualization tools, and dashboards for use by public and research audiences.
7. A large network of community partners to connect with for proposal opportunities, including connections locally and in peer communities across the country along with city, state, and federal contacts within government.