Researchers at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University will begin work in November on a new program intended to disrupt the operations of illicit supply networks—specifically human organ trafficking.
The $291,510 award is one of nine announced this week by the National Science Foundation targeting networks that illegally traffic in everything from people and opioids to nuclear material and human organs. The research will advance the scientific understanding of how illicit supply chains function, a crucial step in dismantling them. The NSF program is collectively titled Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research, or EAGER for short.
“Organ trafficking networks have been severely under-researched compared to other trafficking or crime networks,” said Associate Professor Naoru Koizumi, director of research at the Schar School. Koizumi is the Principal Investigator and will lead a team of researchers, including graduate students, from across several disciplines in performing the work.
“There has been no published work that outlines comprehensive networks of organ trafficking,” she said. “We will apply rigorous network analysis, simulation, and mathematical optimization to understand the network structure and effective network disruption strategies. This is a highly exploratory, yet novel approach to examine the networks with limited available evidence.”
Koizumi will collaborate with Schar School professors Guadalupe Correra-Cabrera, an expert on human trafficking, and Jim Olds, a behavioral scientist. Two scientists from Mason’s Volgenau School of Engineering are also on the team—assistant professor of systems engineering and operations research Hadi El-Amine and computer scientist Duminda Wijesekera.
Other universities represented on the team include Schar School alumnus and University of Boston professor of public policy Amit Patel, Michigan State University assistant professor of anthropology Monir Moniruzzaman, and mathematician Monica Gentili of the University of Louisville.
Three graduate students, including one each from Mason, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and the University of Louisville, will be hired to work on the project.
"This is a perfect example of synergistic research—pairing social scientists with engineers and computer scientists before the research project is underway," said Jon Leland, director of the NSF’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.
"Social scientists are bringing domain expertise on the human aspects of trafficking and trying to understand, for example, how criminals interact and build networks, how targets are selected, and what makes a target or a victim susceptible. Engineers and computer scientists bring expertise that allows us to understand the mathematical structure of networks and how they should function. The result is an analytical depiction of a real-world trafficking network and, hopefully, recipes for disrupting it."
The eight other awards in the EAGER program are listed here. The work continues until October 2021.