Sub Navigation:
Secondary Navigation:
Main Content:
Breadcrumb Navigation:
Home>Australia>Faculty & Research>Heinz Research
Heinz Research
Heinz College has an international reputation for the quality of our research. Our interdisciplinary environment creates exciting opportunities for collaboration and produces a breadth of research work not typically found in schools of our size.
Our faculty and research centers consistently receive funding support from government agencies, foundations and corporate partners. The National Science Foundation; the Heinz Endowments; The Mellon Foundation; the U.S. Departments of Defense, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development; the Sloan Foundation and the National Institute of Justice are some of the many organizations supporting our work.
Our faculty’s expertise cuts across a number of fields as we explore the intersection of technology, policy and management. Areas of focus include criminal justice, health care, social welfare, management, and information systems. Here are some examples of research that members of the Heinz College faculty are conducting.
Decision Making and Policy
Despite the planet-changing impact technology has had on the world, society still grapples with many of the same issues – poverty, class division, diminishing civic engagement: the list is in many ways similar to the same list you could have drawn up 100 years ago. How can information technology be brought to bear on these and other problems that impact how we communicate, learn, conduct business, make decisions and live? There is still a great deal of work to be done to realize the promise that technology holds to make the world a better place, and Carnegie Mellon researchers are exploring some of these new areas.
Predicting Crime Might be the First Step in Preventing Crime
Jacqueline Cohen and Wil Gorr have spent the last 15 years working at the leading edge of fighting crime at the street level with information technology. Through a series of grants from the National Institute of Justice, they pioneered data integration and crime mapping systems for use by detectives and uniformed officers. This pioneering work on the use of Geographical Information Systems and associated decision support systems has had a significant impact on practice. Their recent work adds predictive capabilities for crime fighting systems through their introduction and testing of leading-indicator forecasting models. Cohen and Gorr assembled a "laboratory" of crime data with six million incidents from two cities and over a dozen years to show that leading indicator crimes are successful in predicting large increases in serious crimes.
Gorr’s teaching builds upon his research on the ways in which technology impact social issues. He teaches core courses in the MSPPM program in the information technology area as well as geographic information systems courses and project courses. He and his colleague, Kristen Kurland, have recently written four geographic information systems textbooks.
Employment, Organizational Behavior
Denise Rousseau's research focuses upon the impact workers have on the employment relationship and the organizations that employ them. It informs critical concerns such as worker well-being and career development, organizational effectiveness, the management of change, firm ownership and governance. Recognized in particular for developing the theory of the psychological contract, (Great Minds in Management, Oxford University Press, edited by Ken Smith and Michael Hitt), her work addresses the powerful reach individual employee's understanding of the employment relationship has on work groups, firms, and society.
Her publications include over a dozen books and 140 articles and monographs in management and psychology journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Executive, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Organizational Science, Human Relations, Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational and Occupational Psychology, and Journal of Vocational Behavior.
Her teaching translates organizational research into evidence-based, positive professional practices benefiting firms, workers, and other stakeholders. Courses focus on performance management, strategic human resource practices, and managing change all from an evidence-based perspective, and are designed to build the learner's professional expertise and translate evidence-based concepts into effective action.