“For more than 30 years, we have collaborated with our Model System colleagues...,” said Trevor Dyson-Hudson, MD, director of the Center for Spinal Cord injury Research at Kessler Foundation and co-director of the NNJSCIS. “This most recent grant enables us to continue to contribute to the important work of the SCI Model Systems." Steven Kirshblum, MD, is co-director of the NNJSCIS, director of Spinal Cord Injury Services at Kessler Institute, and chief medical officer for Kessler Institute and Kessler Foundation: "We will compare the successes of a person-centered early intervention called vocational resource facilitation with that of conventional vocational rehabilitation, looking at individuals’ return to competitive employment following inpatient rehabilitation at Kessler Institute.”

Vanderbilt and Penn State engineers have developed a novel approach to design and fabricate thin-film infrared light sources with near-arbitrary spectral output driven by heat, along with a machine learning methodology called inverse design that reduced the optimization time for these devices from weeks or months on a multi-core computer to a few minutes on a consumer-grade desktop.

Financial inclusion is key to improving economic and social welfare, reducing inequality, and promoting economic growth. Globally, 1.7 billion people have limited access to financial services, especially in the developing world. As governments and NGOs work to strengthen financial resilience, digital technology has become a crucial component. New research from a University of Illinois specialist and a team of international collaborators investigates the intersection of financial and digital literacy and its relationship to resilience-building financial behaviors.