Innovation forums: Big ideas to reverse trajectory of community violence

Generating solutions to complex problems

Regenstrief Institute

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INDIANAPOLIS – Community violence impacts health and wellbeing, disrupting and harming lives and neighborhoods. Community violence is an extremely complex problem which has eluded solution.

Because big ideas to mitigate violence and make communities safer and healthier are urgently needed, a new study from Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University School of Medicine researchers presents the use of innovation forums, held virtually with participants from the community, healthcare and local government to highlight priorities, recommend strategies and identify innovative solutions to counter community violence. In the study 10 groups of innovation forum participants generated 162 potential solutions to community violence.

Among the recurring themes were:

• limiting gun access.
• changing policies to decrease school expulsions of children who become involved in the criminal justice system to provide alternate paths for them that include education.
• limiting promotion of risk factors such as alcohol use.
• increasing the capacity of federally qualified (also known as safety net) health centers.
• altering policies related to affordable housing.
• increasing employment, vocational skills and trade programs.

An overarching big idea that emerged from these innovation forums focused on changing the narrative about community violence by:

• creating media campaigns to destigmatize victims of violence.
• exploring avenues to extinguish misconceptions about violence being produced by individuals with mental illness.
• making policy evidence based.

The innovation forum model was developed by researchers from Regenstrief Institute and the IU School of Medicine to focus on solution generation by those impacted by a perplexing problem. While this study’s innovation forums focused on violence in Indianapolis, a city that is larger than San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Boston or Detroit, the methodology could be utilized by any community to address violence, says study senior author Malaz Boustani, M.D., MPH. He notes that it could also be employed to address other problems. The first application of the innovation forum concept was by Dr. Boustani, who is an aging researcher, geriatrician and agile scientist, to build the Indianapolis Discovery Network for Dementia to improve dementia care.

“The health and the safety of the community is the number one priority,” he said. “In our new study we found that using innovation forums and actually listening to the community and getting to know the local context of violence by being involved with the people who are living the problems and seeking their help and their solutions in a diversified voice, is crucial for generating solutions that might make the future of Indianapolis much brighter.

“This project was called the Big Idea because big problems require big solutions. We learned there was a sense that efforts have been siloed and that if there was collaboration to bring efforts to the community, they would be more effective. Utilizing innovation forums, which focus solely on solution generation, provided multiple intertwined lines to create big ideas.”

Further dissemination of information on countering and preventing community violence, acquired during the process, is planned.

“As a trauma surgeon I see the results of community violence all the time. In addition to physically caring for these patients, I try to connect them to resources that can help them change their lives, recover and avoid this from happening again, but that’s not enough” said study first author Damaris Ortiz, M.D., of the IU School of Medicine and the medical director of Prescription for Hope, a program for patients recovering from a violence-related injury such as a gunshot, stabbing or assault being treated at Eskenazi Health, which has a number of sites that are federally qualified health centers.

“In our study the majority of solutions proposed were not novel. But they were the ones that the innovation forum participants who were living the problem in different spaces across the community, healthcare and government want as solutions -- intensive service opportunities and the creation of protective environments.”

“A qualitative analysis of innovation forums for community violence prevention: the Big Idea” is published in the peer-reviewed journal Discover Public Health. The study received support from the IU School of Medicine, Eskenazi Health and the City of Indianapolis Office of Public Health and Safety.

Authors and affiliations as listed in the publication: 

Damaris Ortiz1,2 · Courtney Casbon1 · Samantha Padgett2 · Ashley Overley2,3,4 · Lauren A. Magee5 ·Zachary W. Adams4 · Ashley D. Meagher1 · Matthew P. Landman1,6 · Tiffany Davis7 · Jessica Belchos8 · Erik W. Streib1,2 · Malaz Boustani9,10, 11

1Department of Surgery, Indiana University School of Medicine

2Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Hospital Smith Level One Trauma Center

3Sandra Eskenazi Mental Health Center

4Department of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine

5Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Indianapolis

6Riley Children’s Health, Indiana University Health

7IU Health Methodist Hospital

8Ascension St. Vincent Indianapolis

9Center of Health Innovation and Implementation Science, Center for Translational Science and Innovation

10Department of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

11Regenstrief Institute

Malaz Boustani, M.D., MPH 

In addition to his role as a research scientist with the Indiana University Center for Aging Research at Regenstrief Institute, Malaz Boustani, M.D., MPH, is the founding director of the Center for Health Innovation and Implementation Science. He is a professor and holds the Richard M. Fairbanks Chair of Aging Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Boustani is also director of care innovation at Eskenazi Health.

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Journal

Discover Public Health

DOI

10.1186/s12982-025-00391-2 

Article Title

A qualitative analysis of innovation forums for community violence prevention: the Big Idea

Age-specific trends in pediatric and adult firearm homicide after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic

JAMA Pediatrics

About The Study: 

This study found a disproportionate spike in firearm homicide among children and adults older than age 30 after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, indicating a change in the association between age and firearm victimization risk. This trend moved the peak victimization risk from age 21 to 19, and rates for children up to age 16 were markedly elevated. These age-specific patterns were most pronounced in later post-onset years. 

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Jonathan Jay, DrPH, JD, email jonjay@bu.edu.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2025.0136)

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2025.0136?guestAccessKey=4826d5d5-9c83-41f6-b5c7-56a2759f6885&utm_source=for_the_media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=032425

 

 

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Journal

JAMA Pediatrics

 

Avoidable mortality across US states and high-income countries

JAMA Internal Medicine

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About The Study: 

This study found that avoidable mortality (comprising both preventable deaths related to prevention and public health and treatable deaths related to timely and effective health care treatment) has worsened across all U.S. states, while other high-income countries show improvement. The results suggest poorer mortality is driven by broad factors across the entirety of the U.S. While other countries appear to make gains in health with increases in health care spending, such an association does not exist across U.S. states, raising questions regarding U.S. health spending efficiency. 

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Irene Papanicolas, PhD, email irene_papanicolas@brown.edu.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0155)

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0155?guestAccessKey=6e140777-9347-46e6-bc5d-f78fca5cb2ee&utm_source=for_the_media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=032425

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Journal

JAMA Internal Medicine

 

How sleep keeps our memories fresh

Neural patterns reorganize during sleep to boost recollection, ISTA scientists show

Institute of Science and Technology Austria

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Professor Jozsef Csicsvari in the lab at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)

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Credit: © Nadine Poncioni / ISTA

Why is sleep so important for learning and memory? Neuroscientists from the Csicsvari group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) provided new insight into this essential function by monitoring neuronal activity in rat brains for up to 20 hours of sleep following spatial learning. Central to the findings are reorganizations of neuronal activity patterns during sleep to reflect those seen during memory recollection upon awakening. The findings were published in Neuron.

A good night’s sleep helps us remember recently learned information, ‘engraving’ our memories. This is also true for animals, as remembering for example the location of food resources is essential for their survival. Scientists can examine this role of sleep in the lab by training lab mice or rats about their environment using various memory tasks. In such experiments designed for spatial learning, the animals must learn and subsequently remember the location of food rewards in mazes. Despite extensive research aimed at understanding the neuronal mechanisms that favor learning, memory formation, and recollection, many questions about these essential brain functions remain unanswered.

Now, researchers from Professor Jozsef Csicsvari’s group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have probed the key roles of sleep stages in optimizing memory recollection. They wirelessly measured neuronal activity patterns in rat brains for up to 20 hours of sleep, considerably extending previously reported measurement times. “We showed that the neuronal assemblies in the early stages of sleep reflect recently learned spatial memories. However, as sleep progresses, neuronal activity patterns gradually transform into those seen later, when the rats awaken and remember the locations of their food rewards,” says Csicsvari.

Mapping—and remembering—reward locations

Past work showed that a cortical brain area called the hippocampus is important both for exploring and maintaining routes in an environment (called spatial navigation), and for spatial learning. Hippocampal neurons keep track of the animal’s location by firing at specific locations, thus forming a cognitive map of the environment. Animals use this map to navigate in space while updating it during learning. In this process, the reward locations play an instrumental role, becoming disproportionately represented on the animals’ cognitive map.
Following spatial learning, the hippocampus plays an important role in enhancing memory during sleep. It does so by reactivating recently learned memory traces. Previously, the Csicsvari group showed that the more often a specific reward location is reactivated during sleep, the better the animal remembered that location when they woke up. On the other hand, when the team blocked the reactivation of a specific reward memory, the animals were unable to recall the respective location.

Reorganizing neuronal patterns during sleep engraves memories

While scientists could so far only examine the reactivation of spatial memories in shorter sleep periods of two to four hours, the team now achieved such experiments during long overnight sleep. Using wireless recordings, they monitored neuronal activity in the hippocampus for up to 20 hours while the rats rested and slept after a spatial learning paradigm.

“Our findings were unexpected. We showed that the activity patterns of neurons linked to the reward locations reorganized during the long sleep,” says ISTA PhD graduate Lars Bollmann, one of the study’s co-first authors. Indeed, when a given reward location was reactivated, not all the neurons that represented that location remained active in the entire sleep. While some did—the ISTA researchers called them a “stable subgroup”—, others stopped firing during later sleep stages. But at the same time, a new group of neurons started to fire gradually. “Most surprisingly, we showed that while the pattern of firing neurons in the early stages of sleep echoed the neuronal activity in the learning phase, this pattern later evolved to mirror the neuronal activity when the rats woke up and remembered where the rewards were located,” adds Bollmann. Thus, the team not only observed a drift in neuronal activity patterns during sleep in the frame of spatial learning but also linked it to the process of memory reactivation. Thus, they shed light on how sleep helps keep memories fresh. In addition, they showed that this reorganization happens during non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep, while REM sleep counteracts it.

Freeing neurons up for new memories?

What could be the role of this phenomenon—called “representational drift”—that occurs in sleep? “We can only speculate in this regard,” says Csicsvari. “It is possible that memory representations must be formed quickly during learning but that such representations are not optimal for long-term storage. Therefore, a process may take place in sleep that optimizes these representations in sleep to reduce brain resources to store a specific memory.” In support of this hypothesis, the researchers observed that fewer neurons were linked to a given reward location after sleep than before. Therefore, some neurons get freed up to take in newer memories. “Any new memories must find a way to be integrated into existing knowledge. Frequent repetitions of the new memories as well as partial change in the neuronal code may thus help optimize their integration into existing memory representations,” concludes Csicsvari.

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The present research was conducted at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) by the recent ISTA PhD graduate Lars Bollmann and former ISTA postdoc Peter Baracskay (co-first authors) together with former ISTA postdoc Federico Stella, currently an Assistant Professor at Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, The Netherlands, and ISTA Professor Jozsef Csicsvari (co-corresponding authors).

 

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Journal

Neuron

DOI

10.1016/j.neuron.2025.02.025 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Sleep stages antagonistically modulate reactivation drift

Article Publication Date

24-Mar-2025

ONE OF THE SURREALISTS FAVORITE COMICS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Nemo

New research reveals chimpanzees act as ‘engineers’, choosing materials to make tools based on the structural and mechanical properties which make them ideal for the job

University of Oxford

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A Gombe chimpanzee using a termite fishing tool to fish termites.

Credit: Alejandra Pascual-Garrido 

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Credit: Alejandra Pascual-Garrido

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania, the University of Algarve and the University of Porto in Portugal, and the University of Leipzig, have discovered that chimpanzees living in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania employ a degree of engineering when making their tools, deliberately choosing plants that provide materials that produce more flexible tools for termite fishing.

These findings, published in the journal iScience, have important implications for understanding the technical abilities associated with the making of perishable tools – a topic which remains a highly unknown aspect of human technological evolution.

Termites are a good source of energy, fat, vitamins, minerals and protein for chimpanzees. To eat the insects, chimpanzees need to use relatively thin probes to fish the termites out of the mounds where they live. Given that the inside of the mounds is made up of winding tunnels, the scientists hypothesized that using flexible tools would be more effective for chimpanzees at fishing out the insects than using rigid sticks.

To test this, first author Alejandra Pascual-Garrido took a portable mechanical tester to Gombe and measured how much force it took to bend plant materials used by the apes compared to plant materials that were available but never used. Findings showed that plant species never used by chimpanzees were 175 percent more rigid than their preferred materials.

Furthermore, even among plants growing near termite mounds, those that showed obvious signs of regular use by the apes produced more flexible tools than nearby plants that showed no signs of use.

"This is the first comprehensive evidence that wild chimpanzees select tool materials for termite fishing based on specific mechanical properties," says Alejandra Pascual-Garrido, who has been studying the raw materials used in chimpanzee tools in Gombe for more than a decade.

Notably, certain plant species, such as Grewia spp., also constitute tool material for termite fishing chimpanzee communities living up to 5,000 kilometres away from Gombe, implying that the mechanics of these plant materials could be a foundation for such ubiquitous preferences, and that rudimentary engineering may be deeply rooted in chimpanzee tool-making culture.

Wild chimpanzees may therefore possess a kind of "folk physics" – an intuitive comprehension of material properties that helps them choose the best tools for the job.

Their natural engineering ability is not just about using any stick or plant that is available; chimpanzees specifically select materials with mechanical properties that can make their foraging tools more effective.

Dr Alejandra Pascual-Garrido, Research Affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, said: ‘This novel approach, which combines biomechanics with animal behaviour, helps us better understand the cognitive processes behind chimpanzee tool construction and how they evaluate and select materials based on functional properties’.

The findings raise important questions about how this knowledge is learned, maintained and transmitted across generations, for example, by young chimpanzees observing and using their mothers' tools, and whether similar mechanical principles determine chimpanzees' selection of materials for making other foraging tools, such as those used for eating ants or harvesting honey.

‘This finding has important implications for understanding how humans might have evolved their remarkable tool using abilities,’ explains Adam van Casteren, Department of Human Origins, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a specialist in biomechanics and evolutionary biology. ‘While perishable materials like wood rarely survive in the archaeological record, the mechanical principles behind effective tool construction and use remain constant across species and time’.

By studying how chimpanzees select materials based on specific structural and/or mechanical properties, we can better understand the physical constraints and requirements that would have applied to early human tool use. Using such a comparative functional framework provides new insights into aspects of early technology that are not preserved in the archaeological record.

 

Notes to editors

For more information contact news@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Images are available here (including a document with credits and captions): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UoxP-UfmF4VYZWXJB5Xr_V9LJSo5x6zr

This research was funded by the John Fell Fund, University of Oxford, and the Dennis Stanfield Memorial Fund granted by the Linnean Society of London. Read the full research paper on publication: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.112158

 

About the University of Oxford

Oxford University has been placed number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the ninth year running, and number 3 in the QS World Rankings 2024. At the heart of this success are the twin-pillars of our ground-breaking research and innovation and our distinctive educational offer.

Oxford is world-famous for research and teaching excellence and home to some of the most talented people from across the globe. Our work helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations. The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of our research alongside our personalised approach to teaching sparks imaginative and inventive insights and solutions.

Through its research commercialisation arm, Oxford University Innovation, Oxford is the highest university patent filer in the UK and is ranked first in the UK for university spinouts, having created more than 300 new companies since 1988. Over a third of these companies have been created in the past five years. The university is a catalyst for prosperity in Oxfordshire and the United Kingdom, contributing £15.7 billion to the UK economy in 2018/19, and supports more than 28,000 full time jobs.

A Gombe chimpanzee using a termite fishing tool to fish termites

A female chimpanzee eating termites using a tool alongside her infant                                                          

at Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania

Credit: Alejandra Pascual-Garrido

Dr Alejandra Pascual-Garrido at a termite mound recently fished by chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania

Credit: Dr Alejandra Pascual-Garrido

Journal

iScience

DOI

10.1016/j.isci.2025.112158 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Engineering skills in the manufacture of tools by wild chimpanzees

Article Publication Date

24-Mar-2025

Marxists.orgwww.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/

The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man

Engels never finished it, nor even this intro, which breaks off at the end. It would be included in Dialectics of Nature. I. Labour is the source of all wealth, ...