Improving measures of nutritional access and the SNAP eligibility/participation gap for military-connected families.
Exploratory products released by the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrate that SNAP eligibility and participation rates vary across space and time (2021). Yet, there have been few efforts to correlate this eligibility/participation gap with individual/ community-level characteristics.

While we currently conceive a food environment to be the place where the respondent lives, this approximation needs to be more socially accurate. My team focuses on how journey-to-work information can generate insights about rural and urban food environments. This way, SNAP-Ed Practitioners across the nation can better grasp how where people work influences where they get their food.

We create this computational model by linking the restricted-use American Community Survey (ACS) with nine states’ SNAP/TANF administrative records. We then use machine learning to scale these local definitions nationally. This also introduces one potential opportunity for addressing the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) in hierarchical space models. Findings will be disclosed to support programming and services specifically for military-connected and socially disadvantaged families participating in the SNAP program.

Exploring how veterans navigate entrepreneurial ecosystems in rural areas
Our ongoing work investigates how entrepreneurial ecosystems affect the ability of military veterans in rural America to start and grow their own businesses. If a veteran-owned SME is established in an area with a weak ecosystem or fails to integrate into the necessary networks, this SME will likely not persevere. Rural ecosystems are unique in their limited access to capital and labor, and their distance from infrastructure. Our past research has also found that the most common challenges for military veteran entrepreneurs in these ecosystems is the inability to form social networks and find adequate mentorship. In this effort, we can connect a broader body of literature in rural SME development with the current literature in veteran studies to create programming, as well as benchmarks to set the relational conditions for homegrown entrepreneurial activity among veterans.

(re)Framing the student veteran in higher education
The Chez Veteran Center has found that military-connected students are a highly diverse subpopulation at Urbana–spanning race/ethnicity, gender identity/sexual orientation, disability status, and many other identities. Student veterans do not shed their identities or trauma of historical injustices when they don the uniform. As a result, these additional social forces can hinder psychosocial adjustment, well-being, and academic performance. From a programmatic standpoint, Chez finds that a critical barrier to addressing these social forces is a lack of leadership in the military-connected student service community around diverse experiences. We seek to engage dynamic voices and intersectionality as a path to a fresh perspective on how institutional barriers in higher education may hinder adjustment after service for all student veterans and other military-connected students.