Team History

The academic research investigators first met in May 2017 at a series of workshops organized by Matt Kammer-Kerwick and Noel Busch-Armendariz through support from the National Science Foundation.  The goal of the workshops was to see if operations research, which is a field that is focused on the mathematical modeling of systems and decision-making processes, could help to understand how to disrupt human trafficking.  Kelle Barrick and Lauren Martin were invited to these workshops due to their extensive domain expertise on human trafficking; Kayse Maass was invited to the workshop due to her early work on how operations research could be applied to human trafficking; and Tom Sharkey was invited to his work on applying operations research to other illicit trafficking networks.  Lauren, Kayse, and Tom helped to write a piece coming out of the workshop that called on the engineering community to help address human trafficking.  

In October 2018, the academic team began their first funded research project together called Modeling Operations of Sex Trafficking (MOST).  The MOST project was funded by the National Science Foundation and really focused on building a strong foundation of a community-based, transdisciplinary research process that would allow for our team to best understand how we should approach human trafficking research.  This understanding helped to develop our team values and recognizes that no research can capture all of the complexities of the lived experiences of victims and survivors of human trafficking.  Our team is particularly focused on making sure that we explore the unintended consequences of our research from a variety of perspectives. As such, we formed a survivor-centered advisory group for the MOST project to guide our research.

Our team was extremely fortunate and secured two additional funded research projects in January 2021.  The first project (funded by the National Science Foundation) focused on disrupting effective network disruptions of sex trafficking network operations and the second project (funded by the National Institute of Justice) focused on understanding and disrupting the recruitment processes of sex trafficking networks.  Our research process transformed during these projects by including our survivor-centered "advisory group" as research partners through each step.  For example, the survivor-centered research partners drove the formation of our research question on forced criminality of sex trafficking victims and guided the scoping of an OR model to capture it.  As another example, they helped to construct a Markov Chain model of recruitment pathways into sex trafficking and helped to scope a video on it in order for its dissemination to be accessible to general audiences.  

You can learn more about the background of the team members and our alumni.  We are on a mission to continue to conduct transformative research that brings together all forms of knowledge about human trafficking and equally values the contributions of each form.  

About the Team

• Team Values

• Current Team Members

• Team Alumni