A new study by Christelle Viauroux, an associate professor of economics, found that requiring recreational boat operators to wear life jackets would increase the odds of surviving a boating accident by 80 percent. Viauroux conducted the study with Ali Gungor of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Standards Evaluation and Analysis Division and the findings were published in Risk Analysis.

The researchers used data from 2008 to 2011 from the U.S. Coast Guard’s Boating Accident Report Database (BARD) and compared life jacket use to other factors affecting fatalities in recreational boating.

A major goal of the research was to assess the impact of a mandatory life jacket policy on the recreational boating fatality rate. “However, such a major and controversial policy cannot be implemented without a thorough investigation of life jacket effectiveness. A lot of the work focusing on reducing recreational boating fatalities lacked the availability of life jacket use data,” the authors wrote in their published findings.

The research recently received news coverage in U.S. News Health. The story noted that from 2008 to 2011, making life jacket use mandatory would have likely led to a 20 percent increase in life jacket use by recreational boaters and “the researchers estimated the increased life jacket use would have saved more than 1,700 boaters and more than 1,200 drowning victims.” Read “Mandatory life jacket laws could reduce boating deaths” in U.S. News.

Read more about Christelle Viauroux’s research and a press release announcing the findings of the study.

Tim Brennan, professor of public policy and economics, was quoted in a recent Brisbane Times article about the possibility of proposed net neutrality rules in Australia. Brennan, who served as chief economist of the FCC last year, was interviewed after presenting a talk about attempts to create net neutrality rules for U.S. carriers at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) annual regulatory conference in Brisbane earlier this month.

Brennan urged regulators to take a cautious approach to net neutrality in Australia: “Before Australia embarks on net neutrality, it should have evidence of a problem and not merely presumptions that there could be a problem. Even a monopoly broadband provider has incentives to offer high-quality, unbiased access to its subscribers,” he told the Brisbane Times.

“Restricting the ability of broadband service providers to negotiate with specific users could inhibit the development of new innovations that over time could benefit all,” he added, pointing to the example of exclusive agreements between Apple and AT&T Mobile that led to the development of the iPhone and other smartphones.

Brennan is an expert in antitrust law and policy, regulatory economics, electricity markets, telecommunications and broadcast policy, and copyright and intellectual property. In addition to serving as FCC chief economist, he is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, an independent organization that conducts economic research and analysis. Read more about Brennan’s research on the School of Public Policy website.

Danielle L. Beatty Moody, an assistant professor of psychology, has received a Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The five-year, $600,000 project will investigate the ways in which racial disparities in exposure to early life social disadvantage promote accelerated diseases and disorders related to the brain including stroke, dementia, and cognitive decline in African Americans across the span of the lifetime.

“Pronounced racial disparities are observed across multiple clinical and subclinical brain health endpoints in African Americans compared to Whites and may be attributable, in part, to accelerated age-related disease processes,” NIH stated in a public health relevance statement announcing the award.

“The interrelations among life course social disadvantage, accelerated aging, and brain health endpoints have been grossly understudied and are crucial to developing appropriate prevention and intervention strategies geared toward reducing and ultimately eliminating race-related health disparities in brain aging,” Dr. Beatty Moody explained in the award announcement.

Beatty Moody, as the primary investigator of the project, will work with 300 participants in the study to determine whether early life social disadvantage is related to MRI-indicators of brain pathology predictive of future stroke and cognitive decline and if they are more pronounced in African American than White adults. She will also research potential psychosocial, behavioral, and biomedical mediators of those associations.

Professor Beatty Moody’s research interests focus on cardiovascular disease, health and racial/ethnic disparities, psychosocial stressors, socioeconomic status, and discrimination. Read more about her research on the psychology department website. Read the Career Development Award announcement on the NIH website.

Proposals for the 2016 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipends competition are due to the UMBC Office of the Vice President for Research by Friday, August 28, 2015. UMBC may submit up to two nominations for NEH Summer Stipends (NEH deadline is October 1, 2015). Proposals will be evaluated by an internal review process, which will be completed by Friday, September 11, 2015. All applicants will be notified shortly after that date.

NEH Summer Stipends provide outright awards of $6,000 to support two consecutive months of full-time research during summer 2016.

• Instructions for faculty on preparing and submitting internal proposals: http://research.umbc.edu/neh-2016-summer-stipend-program-internal-proposal-guidelines/ 
• NEH program guidelines: http://www.neh.gov/grants/research/summer-stipends