Improving Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Prevention from the Bottom-up: a Pilot of Getting To Outcomes in the US Military.

While the Department of Defense (DoD) has given increased attention and priority to preventing sexual assault and sexual harassment (SA/SH), it remains a problem. To build its prevention capacity, DoD piloted Getting To Outcomes® (GTO®) from 2019 to 2022 at 10 military installations. GTO is an evidence-based planning and implementation support that has been used in many civilian contexts but has only recently been adapted for military SA/SH. The purpose of this study was to describe GTO use, identify its benefits and challenges, and discuss lessons the GTO effort yielded for prevention more broadly using a framework of organizational and program-level capacities needed for successful prevention in the military context, called the Prevention Evaluation Framework (PEF). GTO was piloted with 10 military installations ("sites") representing all Military Services, plus the Coast Guard and National Guard. GTO is comprised of a written guide, training, and ongoing coaching. The pilot's goal was for each site to use GTO to implement a SA/SH prevention program twice. Participants from each site were interviewed and data was collected on GTO steps completed, whether GTO spurred new evaluation activities and collaborations, and the degree of leadership support for GTO. Most sites completed all GTO steps at least once. Interviews showed that DoD participants believe GTO improved prevention understanding, planning, and evaluation capacity; strengthened confidence in chosen programs; and helped sites tailor programs to the military context. Barriers were the complexity of GTO, DoD personnel turnover, and the disruption that the COVID pandemic caused in sexual assault prevention program delivery. Many respondents were unsure if they would continue all of GTO after the coaching ended, but many believed they would continue at least some parts. According to the PEF, the GTO pilot revealed several additional prevention system gaps (e.g., need for leadership support) and changes needed to GTO (e.g., stronger leader and champion engagement), to support quality prevention. The military and other large organizations will need to focus on these issues to ensure prevention implementation and evaluation are conducted with quality.

From Awareness to Action: Accounting for Infrastructure Interdependencies in Disaster Response and Recovery Planning.

This paper highlights challenges and open questions pertaining to physical and social infrastructure system interdependencies and their implications for disaster response, recovery, and resilience planning efforts. We describe the importance of understanding interdependencies in disaster contexts and highlight limitations to existing approaches. Suggestions for understanding and addressing interdependencies focus on increasing availability of tools for assessing interdependencies and increasing stakeholder and decisionmaker uptake of infrastructure interdependency-related information in planning efforts.

Short-Term Solutions to a Long-Term Challenge: Rethinking Disaster Recovery Planning to Reduce Vulnerabilities and Inequities.

In the immediate aftermath of disaster, governments usually act quickly to reduce risk and to recover their communities' socio-economic functioning. Policy makers in these situations need-but may not have the capacity or time for-substantial analysis and public debate about how to balance short- and long-term societal needs. Inadequate attention to this challenge may result in a deepening of the inequities that increase vulnerability to disaster impacts. We review case examples to illustrate how post-disaster policies may influence the nature, pace, and inclusiveness of community recovery. We then apply a vulnerability/inequity framework to conceptualize how to enhance disaster recovery and avoid perpetuating inequities when weighing the diverse needs of communities across long time horizons.

Precisely tunable engineering of sub-30 nm monodisperse oligonucleotide nanoparticles.

Advancement of RNAi therapies is mainly hindered by the development of efficient delivery vehicles. The ability to create small size (<30 nm) oligonucleotide nanoparticles is essential for many aspects of the delivery process but is often overlooked. In this report, we describe diblock star polymers that can reproducibly complex double-stranded oligonucleotides into monodisperse nanoparticles with 15, 23, or 30 nm in diameter. The polymer-nucleic acid nanoparticles have a core-shell architecture with dense PEG brush coating. We characterized these nanoparticles using ITC, DLS, FRET, FCS, TIRF, and TEM. In addition to small size, these nanoparticles have neutral zeta-potentials, making the presented polymer architecture a very attractive platform for investigation of yet poorly studied polyplex size range for siRNA and antisense oligonucleotide delivery applications.