By Danna Lorch
“At Brandeis, we succeed when we collaborate,” says Lisa Lynch, Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Heller.
Though it just celebrated its first anniversary, the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium center (one of six national entities), which Lynch co-directs, is already making an impact in the field.
The center supports interdisciplinary research, evaluation, data development, and training and education on retirement and disability policy. Funded by the Social Security Administration with a renewable five-year cooperative agreement, it is a true collaboration among four institutions: Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the University of Baltimore; and the employee-owned consulting firm Westat.
“Both of our university partners are minority-serving institutions,” Lynch explains. “As an R1 institution, Brandeis brings the ability to secure large government grants, and they bring a true partnership with a more diverse group of collaborators and researchers.”
By providing an innovative, transdisciplinary, multisite training and education collaboration, the center is dedicated to developing the next generation of scholars who focus on retirement and disability, working on a wide array of topics and applying different methodological approaches.
“We are trying to build a more representative population of scholars. The discourse is different when you change who is in the room having that conversation in the first place,” Lynch explains.
That begins with making graduate work financially accessible. In August, the center announced its first round of dissertation grants for doctoral candidates researching retirement, health, and disability-related issues. Four of these awards went to Heller doctoral students.
In the summer of 2024, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the University of Baltimore offered a program to their undergraduates that concentrated on recent research on retirement and disability policy. “These research areas might not be something that organically comes to mind for a young person. We hope that programs like this will expand and change who enters the graduate student pipeline,” Lynch says.
The center has also launched nine research studies in the past year, five of which are based at the Heller School. Although still in the preliminary phases, technical working papers presenting initial findings will be forthcoming in the fall of 2024. The five Heller-based projects include principal investigators Cindy Thomas, PhD’00; Alexandra Piñeros-Shields, PhD’07; Sangeeta Tyagi, PhD’93, and Marji Warfield, PhD’91; Miriam Heyman and Monika Mitra; and Lisa Lynch and Monica Galizzi.
“An overarching theme of our Heller projects is a focus on the inequities experienced by minorities and other marginalized populations in SSA’s retirement and disability programs,” Lynch says. “In my project with UMass Lowell professor Galizzi, we are exploring how vulnerable workers use Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance, and how contingent work and workplace injuries are associated with disparities in retirement preparedness.”
In addition to launching a quarterly newsletter to share updates and findings, the center is also building a community advisory panel that includes people who represent the groups being researched.
“All of these stakeholders will broaden the discourse when it comes to how the research is imagined,” Lynch says. “We have experience taking our research and putting it into policy. The structure of the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium centers is such that we are in dialogue with the Social Security Administration to ensure that the research we produce is of use and accessible to policymakers, researchers, stakeholder organizations, and the general public.”