The Graduate School of Public and International Affairs is pleased to announce that Professor Sera Linardi has been awarded a the 2021 Pitt Momentum Funds Seeding Grant. She is leading the project, "Community-centric Building of Digital Infrastructures Against Systemic Oppression: G2A police misconduct complaint support system,” in collaboration with Professor Yu-Ru Lin of the Pitt School of Computing and Information.
The Pitt Momentum Funds were created to enhance and streamline internal funding opportunities for faculty research while continuing to support high-quality research, scholarship and creative endeavors. The Funds are structured into a tiered set of awards designed to provide allocations for research seeding, teaming and scaling grants.
Seeding Grants support significant and innovative scholarship by individual or small groups of faculty at all ranks at the University of Pittsburgh. In constructing each year’s portfolio of awards, attention is given to supporting early career faculty and areas where opportunities for extramural funding are extremely limited.
Grief to Action (G2A PxPUC) is a novel community data-science engagement network that is building an online platform to help citizens navigate the police accountability process in Allegheny County. The tool will collect municipal level police union contracts and misconduct complaint processes in one place, allowing anyone the ability to search and compare
Led by GSPIA students Mikaela Chandler and Eliana Beigel, it was adopted as a Fall 2020 capstone project with Professor Lin as advisor, student, staff and faculty volunteers and through the work and experiences of regional partnerships.
G2A PxPUC stems from the establishment of an innovative volunteering platform by the Center for Analytical Approaches to Social Innovation at GSPIA. Grief to Action was founded in June 2020, after the death of George Floyd, with the goal of fighting systemic racism. It now has over 100 volunteers and multiple partnerships across the University, GSPIA, and the region.
Congratulations to Dr. Linardi and all of this year's Seeding Grant awardees!