Human Trafficking Research Lab @Millikin

Since our grant is ending this year, the students and I brainstormed a few fundraising ideas to be able to support paid research assistantships in the Human Trafficking Research Lab for future students. We thought tote bags would be a great way to achieve this and so the students and I designed an eye catching bag that would educate people wherever it went. If you donate more $30 to the Human Trafficking Research Lab at Millikin we will send you one of these tote bags that will support future undergraduate research in the lab and help you raise awareness to human trafficking everywhere you go!  The bags are 100% cotton and printed locally from Oakwood Screen Printing based right here in Decatur, Illinois.  If you would like to donate to the Human Trafficking Research Lab at Millikin University you can make a donation in three different ways: 1) Make a credit card/debit card/EFT gift online at www.millikin.edu/give . Choose the “Millikin Fund” icon box and write “Human Trafficking Resea

We wanted to show the impact of everything we have accomplished since the Human Trafficking Research Lab was established in 2018 in an effort to help us with donations for the lab. So the students and I set out to try and summarize all of the work we have done on various projects that can reveal the impact our work had had on Central Illinois. We started by highlighting our projects and outcomes. Then I wanted to try and quantify some of the work and created information so that people cold donate to support our undergraduate research. It was pretty amazing to see that over 27,000 people have visited our website to check out our work!

This week I presented the research design for our NSF project at the Dmytro Shtohryn International Ukrainian Studies Conference at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The conference is a yearly conference in honor of Dr. Dmytro Shtohryn (1923 – 2019) who established the Ukrainian Studied program at the University of Illinois. The title of the presentation was "Designing Human Trafficking Prevention Approaches in Ukraine" and it was based on the research supported by the National Science Foundation D-ISN/RAPID: Data Collection for Human Trafficking Recruitment and Responses in Forced Migration and Operations Engineering grant (CMMI-2330311). Our research seeks to investigate human trafficking in real time between exploitation and identification evolving due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine is a fruitful crisis case for analysis because of the prevalent use of technology during the migration process which means that we as researchers can track human traffickin