Current Projects
Lab Projects
The following details a number of the current projects that lab members are focused on. Please contact the lead lab member for more information.
Trusted Information and Stakeholder Engagement
The Trusted Information and Stakeholder Engagement Project is funded by the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation and the Department of Energy. The project examines how trust, information, and communication influence stakeholder engagement in communities facing complex risk and infrastructure issues. Focusing on communities surrounding key DOE-EM sites, including Oak Ridge, Savannah River Site, and Portsmouth, the project produces empirically rigorous research using qualitative and quantitative approaches, including interviews, surveys, media analysis, and computational methods that integrate large language models (LLMs) and AI into research workflows. Moreover, the project seeks to better understand trusted information, community information ecosystems, and effective stakeholder engagement while developing evidence-based approaches to risk and scientific communication. Through peer-reviewed journal articles and other research outputs, the project advances scholarship on trust and stakeholder engagement in community-grounded contexts, particularly those involving nuclear energy, radioactive waste, and emerging connections between energy infrastructure and data center development.
Project Lead: Matthew Weber
Graduate Student: Chaeyeong (Margo) Lee
Information Seeking and Trust in Nuclear Energy
The Information Seeking and Trust in Nuclear Energy Project is funded by the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation and the Department of Energy. This project examines how people living near nuclear facilities seek information, determine which sources are trustworthy, and prefer to engage with nuclear energy and storage issues. Through a large-scale survey and community focus groups, the research explores the roles of local news, social media, government agencies, facility operators, community organizations, public officials, and interpersonal networks in shaping understanding and trust. By comparing perspectives across communities and demographic groups, the project aims to identify trusted messengers, clarify how trust develops or erodes over time, and inform more transparent, equitable, and locally responsive communication and engagement strategies.
Project Lead: Matthew Weber
Graduate Student: Mingwei Shen
Consent-Based Siting
The Consent-Based Siting Project is funded by the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation and the Department of Energy. This project examines how communities can participate meaningfully and equitably in decisions about the siting of a federal consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. Working with community advisory boards and other stakeholders near the Hanford Site in Washington and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the research investigates local values, concerns, information practices, and understandings of risk. Interviews and computational methods are used to identify effective, and ineffective, approaches to community engagement, with particular attention to including underserved and historically underrepresented groups. The project seeks to develop community-centered practices that support mutual learning, informed deliberation, sustainable trust, and consent-based decision-making.
Project Lead: Matthew Weber
Graduate Student: Rachel Acosta
Graduate Student Projects
Organizing Risk in Complex Systems
This dissertation examines how environmental risk becomes defined, communicated, and acted upon across complex organizational and community settings. Focusing on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site, the research investigates how official documents construct risk and stakeholder roles, how community members interpret organizational knowledge, and how stakeholder contributions are negotiated within advisory-board meetings and broader media discourse. Using interviews alongside qualitative and computational analysis of documents, meeting records, news, and social media, the study traces how different forms of knowledge gain authority, are translated or contested, and become connected, or fail to connect, to organizational responses. Ultimately, the dissertation explains how organizations and communities navigate enduring uncertainty, competing understandings of risk, and unequal decision-making authority.
Project Lead: Rachel Acosta
Past Projects
Project ASPEN
Project ASPEN is a collaboration between a team of researchers from Rutgers University and the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New Jersey (NAMI NJ) that is funded by a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation (Active Surveillance of Policy Ecosystems and Networks [ASPEN] to Enhance Brokering of Research Evidence into State Policymaking). The big idea behind Project ASPEN is that building a robust infrastructure for producing and disseminating research that is relevant to the implantation of evidence-based guidelines will increase the likelihood that such guidelines are adopted and implemented by policymakers.
Project Lead: Matthew Weber