Synopsis:

In response to many international initiatives, developing countries adopt reforms without sustained improvements in performance. Developing countries adopt these reforms to increase their external legitimacy and support without improving their performance. These attempts can sum up with capability traps in which states cannot improve or even decline their capabilities (Andrews and et al.2013 ). However, after the 1979 revolution, Iran’s institutions and organizations have leveraged their resources and technical expertise to critical mass of people’s’ ability and willingness to initiate and maintain changes. In this lecture, I discuss about Iran, which has been able to escape isomorphic mimicry (which organizations change what they look like instead of what they do.) and improve its capability in the absence of international interventions. To understand how Iran solves its public problems, I structurally analyze a post-revolution successful Iranian reform. Then, I compare those successes with the world’s “best practices” (which often failed due to lack of domestic ownership and adaption of imported reforms) and extract some lessons learned; allowing us to answer the question how Iran can be a game changer in other sectors such as economic growth. Being a game changer in this period of time is very important for Iran’s long time economic growth.

About the Speaker:

Masoomeh Khandan is a Research Fellow at Harvard Center for International Development and a consultant at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in D.C. She won the World Bank fellowship to study the Master of Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) at Harvard Kennedy School of Government (HKS) in 2013. She also won 2015 Susan C. Eaton Memorial Prize for the best paper at HKS. Currently, She is working on economic development and economic growth.
Her undergrad studies were in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology. To address some issues of Iran’s education system, she participated in leading a community of highly motivated volunteers to form the “Asseman Group”, an NGO with the mission “to conceptualize and institute Iranian children with some of the decisive, but unfortunately less-emphasized, skills such as systems thinking, team work and life skills, through edutainment”. Encouraged by this project, she attended “Leading Education Systems at the National Level”, a program offered by Harvard Graduate School of Education. Also, she led a team of students and graduates from Harvard Kennedy School and Sharif University of Technology to evaluate Iranian’s higher education system. The results were delivered to Iran’s Ministry of Higher Education to incorporate in a policy for universities.

For this lecture: light refreshment will be provided

Synopsis:

The 2012 National Health Interview Survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) gathered information on 88,962 American adults and 17,321 children. The survey found that 33.2 percent of adults in the United States aged 18 years and over and 11.6 percent of children age 4 to 17 years used some form of Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) approach in the previous 12 months.
Americans spent $30.2 billion out-of-pocket on CIH during the 12 months prior to the survey. Americans spent $14.7 billion out-of-pocket on visits to complementary practitioners – almost 30 percent of what they spent out-of-pocket on services by conventional physicians ($49.6 billion). They spent $12.8 billion out-of-pocket on natural product supplements – about one-quarter of what they spent out-of-pocket on prescription drugs ($54.1 billion).
Complementary and Integrative Medicine is a rapidly growing component of the healthcare services not only in the USA but worldwide. This talk will review the many facets of this area of healthcare and provide a systematic discussion and comparative analysis of complementary and integrative health disciplines, modalities and research as well as resources for further study of this important sector of health services.

About the Speaker:

Mehrdad Michael Massumi, MD is a board-certified specialist in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and a Diplomate of the American Academy of Pain Management.
After graduation with honors from the University of Birmingham Medical School (UK) and two years of surgical residency training at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. he undertook and concluded successfully his residency in Rehabilitation Medicine in Seattle, WA in 1988. He remains active at Harvard Postgraduate Medical Association.
Dr. Massumi has been in practice for twenty-eight years in Maryland. He was the founder or director of many Rehabilitation, Spine and Pain clinics in the Baltimore Metropolitan hospitals. He is a former clinical faculty of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He is currently in private practice in Baltimore and more recently also in Rockville, MD.

For this lecture: light refreshment will be provided

Synopsis:

The interesting dynamics of vehicular traffic has gained both engineers and physicists attention for decades. While traffic engineering has been very successful in predicting or even controlling the traffic in a given situation based on empirical data, physicists approach is usually quite different. Physicist are mostly interested in modeling traffic in order to describe the general features of typical traffic. Developing models not only can provide an understanding towards the complexity of the traffic phenomena, but also may help to extract the fundamental aspects of traffic and use them to predict and control the real traffic state. 
The flow of traffic represents a many-particle non-equilibrium problem with important practical consequences. Traffic flow shows well defined collective behavior where the free flow of traffic at low density changes abruptly with growing density to a denser phase with jams. The jams themselves show organized motions with start-stop waves as the cars creep forward. In addition to free flow and jam phases, there are also instances of synchronized flow at low velocity. Understanding the collective dynamical behavior and controlling the jams will give insight into effective traffic management.

About the Speaker:

Ashkan Balouchi is a Data Scientist at LifeNome, a revolutionary personal genomics company with the aim of revolutionizing how individuals make well-being decision. He received his PhD in physics from Louisiana State University on feedback control analyses on complex dynamical systems. He focused on modeling the traffic phenomenon using theoretical physics and strong numerical simulations to understand the underlying features of the traffic jams. He was also a member of Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics. Before moving to the US in 2010, He received his MSc. and BSc. from Sharif University of Technology, during which he trained more than 20 international physics Olympiad medal winners.