I am a maroon engineer, activist, decision scientist, organizer, parent, and artist who teaches and researches on communal decision making and public policy in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech as a Georgia Power Faculty Fellow.
In “Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution: Collective Action in the African Diaspora,” Crystal Nicole Eddins explores the concept of Maroons in the context of the Haitian Revolution. Therein she lays out the following description for maroons:
Maroons were enslaved Africans who escaped from plantations and formed independent communities. These communities were often located in remote, difficult-to-access areas, which helped them avoid recapture. Maroons used their cultural and religious heritages, social networks, and skills to survive and resist colonial oppression.
In my practice of modern maroonage, I inhabit the spirit of resistance and resilience rooted in my Haitian ancestry. We engage in collective action through cultural rituals, community solidarity, and innovative strategies to challenge oppression. By honoring the legacy of the Haitian Revolution, modern Maroons can continue to fight for social justice, environmental sustainability, as well as the physical, emotional and spiritual empowerment of marginalized communities, blending historical wisdom with present-day methodologies to create a more equitable future.
Community-Based Operations Research (CBOR) is a sub-discipline within operations research and management sciences that synthesizes qualitative and quantitative methods to address localized problems faced by marginalized communities.
I am particularly interested in decision making under uncertainty, collective decision making under uncertainty, as well as predictive and speculative models that can inform health systems & public policy at the individual, interpersonal, and systemic levels.
Before joining the Georgia Tech faculty, I was a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Institute for Technology Assessment at the Harvard Medical School, where I leveraged simulation models to explore the impact of breathing modulation and other meditation and mindfulness techniques on disease mitigation strategies.
My research draws on tools from stochastic optimization and decision making, simulation, organization theory, public policy, machine learning and economics to evaluate status quo policies and develop interpretable solutions to resource allocation and decision-making problems and the individual, communal, and societal levels. I also draw on learnings and theory from radical queer Black feminist scholars, community-engaged research, and a decade long personal history of community building and organizing in the US and global souths.
With the overabundance of health recommendations and models, from alcohol consumption to COVID-19 management, many individuals in this data rich and model intensive environment are not clear on the implications of the models that currently drive public health discourse. In practice the models can be complex, interpretation difficult, and access limited, making actionable steps beyond those pro-offered by the researcher hard to come by. In response, I seek to build interpretable models with open-source tools, where in an interested party can perform alternative experiments for different groups even as we provide interpretations of optimal solutions.
In the context of health decision-making, operations research tools can be instrumental in addressing the significant burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which are responsible for almost two-thirds of deaths worldwide. In the United States alone, preventable cardiometabolic diseases related to diets cost $50.4 billion annually. Similar to other consumption-related diseases, alcohol-related liver disease can be seen as a competition between the body’s healing capabilities and the destructive metabolic reactions from substance breakdown. Operations research can optimize health interventions by modeling these complex interactions and identifying effective strategies for prevention and treatment. By leveraging data and advanced analytical techniques, we can develop targeted policies and interventions that improve long-term health outcomes.
Beyond alcohol we also consider other behaviors and diseases including but not limited to: diabetes, marijuana consumption, head and neck cancers, and lung diseases.
COVID
As COVID-19 reaches an endemic nature individuals, organizations, and communities are not equally resourced with models to understand how to best allocate budgets and decisions based on the underlying characteristics and risks profiles of individuals. By building a survey and modelling framework that can inform individuals on short and long-term risks relative to their behaviors and prevailing COVID realities in their geographies and personal networks.
The reality of the COVID-19 pandemic is that trust in recommendations from the CDC and government entities are at an all-time low. On the other hand, actionable data to parametrize models is more available then ever before, and the public is at times confused about how to incorporate the vast amount of recommendations and data.
Our intersectional analysis is applied through a Markov decision process model that can be used by a variety of actors to help drive policy including at the individual, familial, community, working environment, and societal levels.
System Design: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Workforce Impact Modeling
This study seeks to explore how race and racism influence diagnosis and treatment and asks: (1) To what extent can medical training reduce racial bias in cardiovascular and pulmonary care? (2) How can medical education and training prepare trainees and providers to remove race-based practices?
Systems engineering, when harnessed for liberation, becomes a potent tool for dismantling oppressive structures and fostering equitable change by actively dismantling systemic barriers and empowering those who have historically been marginalized.
Isolated and marginalized individuals, families, communities, and organizations often have the least access to the data and research tools currently being developed in Western academic systems. Alongside my role as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech researching and teaching on health policy and social policy issues, I also engage community as a member/volunteer in the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy ecosystem, to build and facilitate learning around evidence to clarify the likely outcomes, trade-offs, costs, and benefits of a complex interaction of specific policies and dilemmas faced by communities in Atlanta and beyond.
I support experimentation on models that are accessible, relevant, and available to community actors as they practice transformative justice and abolition, mutual aid, to transfer power from state actors to local communities. I believe designing tools that support democratic decision and policymaking, at its most basic level, is about supporting the actualization democratic practice that is truly accountable to all including those who have been traditionally sidelined in US American society.
As a Maroon system engineer, deeply rooted in the principles of resilience, community solidarity, and resistance to oppression, I am naturally drawn to building infrastructure that supports mutual aid, cooperation, and abolition. Here’s why:
The current system of finance is programmed to extract profit despite the harm this inflicts on the people we care about and the places we call home. It is a system that reinforces historical racial inequities and threatens the health of the planet we all share.
That’s why we are creating something different: a cooperative network for non-extractive finance, one that advances workplace democracy and grows the capacity of communities to determine their own economic future, starting with the workers the current system excludes.
Working with Regenerate Atlanta Cooperative Wealth Fund, we support local businesses in generating insight into how cooperative worker-owners can generate resources for their families and communities while working in affirming environments.
The Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund was created by community members from metro-Atlanta who have witnessed the needs of their neighbors at this time of crisis. While COVID-19 is a health pandemic, it has crippled economies and interrupted markets, causing wide-spread unemployment. Our concern is not with fixing the economy but instead with meeting the needs of people left with uncertainty and disruption.
Learn more @ About Us — Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund
Current Questions:
Guided by the lived experiences of formerly-incarcerated folx, we work to extricate our people from dehumanizing cages and to resource a network of healing, legal and mutual aid as we organize to build alternative futures for ourselves and our communities. Our mission is to create transformative systemic change through the creation of a Black-led abolition foundation and network as we organize and envision the end to discriminatory, coercive, and oppressive jailing. We believe that every movement towards our mission and vision helps dismantle the social, political, and economic barriers that dehumanize Black people.
We enable our people to return home to their families and communities while awaiting their court dates by providing bail assistance to individuals deemed eligible for release before trial contingent on paying bail. We post bail regardless of charge and/or court history.
Leveraging child and community-centered approaches within uncertain decision-making processes can empower marginalized communities by prioritizing family units, acknowledging past trauma, and shifting the focus toward reparation, ultimately fostering seventh generation futures, cultural continuity, and collective memory.
As researchers we play crucial roles in supporting marginalized communities. Here are some values we practice for effective engagement:
By fostering collaboration, cultural humility, and community integration, we can contribute meaningfully to the well-being and empowerment of marginalized communities.
Ethical excellence in our lab means adhering to rigorous ethical standards throughout research, development, and implementation processes. It encompasses:
Ethical excellence means integrating ethical considerations into every stage of our research, fostering responsible innovation, and ensuring that technology aligns with our individual, interpersonal, systemic, and ancestral values and societal needs.
In “Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution: Collective Action in the African Diaspora,” Crystal Nicole Eddins proffers the following tenets of marronage:
The tenets of marronnage include:
Our policy research lab is a dynamic space where we as researchers interact with practitioners and collaborate to explore and analyze various aspects of public policy using operations research and systems engineering methodologies to advance consensual & collective decision making.
