Presenting at the Ukrainian Studies Conference

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 trafficking as it happened and evolved over the displacement timeline. 

The conference was organized by the Slavic Research Service and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois and the program can be found here. It was great to present our research design and since it was a hybrid conference my co-investigator Renata Konrad, Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was even able to zoom in and answer some questions. 

Lovely view of main library at the university of Illinois.

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