ACTION RESEARCH PARTNERS
NYU's Marron Institute acts as the coordinating partner, conducting innovative applied research, working with governments and NGOs to take on critical challenges of modern living. The Institute operates on a model of academic venture capital in which the faculty who run research programs receive seed funding. Faculty members use seed funds to develop their programs, hire research staff, and build portfolios of externally funded projects. Currently, the Marron Institute has four major research programs focused on urban planning, environmental health, civic analytics, and public sector performance and innovation.
Marron’s chief focus is the pursuit of sponsored research that will extend the impact of the Institute’s founding gift and have a positive and measurable impact on quality of life worldwide.
Litmus, a program of the Marron Institute charged with promoting innovation in the public sector, works with public agencies and the people they serve to develop and rigorously test new ideas for improving performance. Litmus creates opportunities for research to be done with, rather than on, public sector practitioners and the people they serve. We believe in the importance of people and place, and we never adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to policies and practices. Whether working with agencies focused on criminal justice, education, healthcare, or social services, Litmus aims to change the way that knowledge is created in the public sector. We facilitate “deliberative innovation”—a process of engagement and experimentation that empowers public agencies to test their own ideas, on their own terms, with the full confidence that our team will support them on the analytical details and leave them with the ability to sustain evidence-supported innovation. Litmus' team of practitioners and scholars have decades of experience and emphasize a collaborative approach, developing ideas conceived in the field into testable pilot programs that can be taken to scale. Litmus' wide network of partner agencies and NGOs provides a pathway to disseminate important findings quickly and effectively. Litmus prioritizes a data-driven approach; whenever possible, we leave agencies with the ability to continue data collection and analysis, yielding smarter, better-informed public policies.
NYU Langone Health’s Department of Population Health, part of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, is one of the first departments of population health to be launched at an academic medical center. The program is comprised of a diverse group of faculty and staff working on pressing challenges in New York City and around the world with the twin goals of improving health for all while simultaneously reducing health inequities. In its research, Population Health develops and tests real-world solutions in partnership with healthcare systems, communities, policymakers, and other groups to continuously advance the field of population health, uniting the expertise of researchers from disciplines across NYU Langone. Through training programs for medical and other graduate students, postgraduate students, and health professionals, Population Health educates future leaders in the field. The Department of Population Health seeks to bridge the divide between medicine and public health to couple the knowledge and expertise of both fields and improve the health of populations.