What's Your StORy? Kara Morgan

Name: Kara Morgan

Employer: Quant Policy Strategies, LLC

Job Title: Principal

INFORMS member since 2003

It certainly wasn't a straight road! I was always a really mathy kid. I had a great high school math teacher (shout out to Mr. Kelly) and I just loved it. It seemed very natural to me. I went to Michigan State (Go Green!) for undergrad, and at the time they had a math education degree or straight math. I didn't want to teach K-12, so I chose the math degree, without really any idea what kind of job I could get. By then, my parents had moved to D.C., so I moved there and looked for work. I found a job at a small consulting firm lead by retired Air Force officers where I learned modeling and logistics, regression and data, and all kinds of software (Thanks Dr. Bob Sims). It was a great experience, but I didn't see myself staying in DoD contracting. So I went back to school and earned a master’s degree in environmental science at Indiana University. There, I learned about mathematical models, but that still wasn't quite enough. I liked doing the models, but I wanted to know the answer to “So what?”. That is, how are people using these models, and what are the decisions being made with the results? So, with encouragement from a professor at IU (Thanks Dr. Diane Henshel), I went on to get my Ph.D. at a program called Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon. That's where I was able to tie the quantitative skills with policy decision-making and see where that connected, how it works, how it doesn't work. Of course, I learned from a lot of amazing researchers there. And that's that space that I have been working in since.

I've worked in the public sector, private sector and academia, so I have a broad range of experiences. One thing that I found interesting is when I was at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), I was working on some issues that were being covered in the media. That was the first time when people outside of work were talking about things that I was working on. Seeing the difference between the way the media portrayed the story and how it was being talked about in articles, compared to what I knew, had a big impact on me. I don't think there's anything intentional; it’s a combination of media trying to get people to pay attention to their stories and the fact that the public relations people in the government aren't necessarily going to share all the details, and their job is to show the agency in a good light. There’s a gap. Since then, I interpret things I see in public discussion with a different lens.

The good outcomes part is related to strategic planning. Having good outcomes is accomplished by making sure you set out clarifying what it is you want to accomplish. A lot of times in the public sector, that planning step is taken for granted. Certainly, in the private sector it is more straightforward because the outcomes are usually in terms of profit. Within the government, in my experience, people don't spend as much time as they should thinking about: what is it that I'm trying to accomplish with this decision?

The data-driven part comes in in terms of linking the data that you have, or the data that you need or wish you had, to those outcomes that you care about, and developing metrics that can report progress along the way. Typically, the way people go about developing metrics is based on the data they have instead of the data that's relating to the outcomes.

That's kind of what I talk with people about, having that whole logic model, if you will, the picture of what it is you're trying to achieve and how all the things you're doing are related to that and having the data and metrics to measure that.

The work I did at the FDA included that type of situation. We'd have a new piece of legislation, for example, and there are a lot of stakeholders at the agency and outside the agency who are involved in implementing the legislation. We had to develop risk-based metrics to measure progress. For example, the produce rule was something that I worked on. The legislation requires companies to do a lot more than they had been doing in terms of collecting and tracking data. Leadership wanted to make sure that there were clear measures of impact. The first instinct is to keep track of number of inspections and see who's compliant with inspections. But that's not exactly the outcome everyone cares about. Yes, you can assess compliance with the law, but really the stakeholders – the private sector and consumer advocates – want to know, is this making food safer?

Having the data to do that is much more difficult than having the data to talk about whether firms are in compliance and how many inspections have been completed. So that's the kind of work that we would do – nudge people to think about not just reporting on the data that you have, but find or generate data that is in some way linked to the outcome you care about.

The outcome that everyone wanted from this was to have safer produce. So, what are the ways that we can measure that? It is really difficult. There are lots of uncertainties, but trying to nudge people more toward that idea of having the data that they need to reflect on the real outcomes of their work.

I think this is a great question. When I graduated college, I had a math degree. I think it's a bit different now; there are more analytics tracks offered in college. But I think there's a lot that could be done. I don't think data science has really been incorporated [in undergrad] yet. Similar to the STEM discussions, a lot of funding and research and focus are now on STEM in high school and even middle school, and some work to get data science to be a part of that.

Analytics also might be coming up in some high schools, but usually there’s computer science, math, maybe statistics, but the applied piece is missing. Getting some kind of discussion about data science earlier on would be good so that people who maybe don't want to take a calculus class, could still explore data science or data management.

I also think – across the board – there should be more interaction between people who have jobs and kids in school. In middle school and high school, there should be more effort to pull experts from the community to talk about jobs, because there's still a huge disconnect between what kids are learning in school and their understanding of what the jobs are out there. I would love to see more of that.

It’s challenging that we ask kids to choose a career path at this young age – when they are picking what college to attend and a major. I didn't know anything about career options then and I think a lot of people feel the same way. But you're forced to decide, and without having those people with experience come in and tell you about these jobs that you don't know exist.

There’s a limited view of what jobs people have based on your parents or your friends’ parents.

On top of that, I was on the State Board of Education, Ohio, for a couple of years, and there was a study done with an organization called Knowledge Works that talked about future jobs and what they found (this was a couple of years ago), is that the kids in kindergarten, by the time they graduate high school and are out in the job market, something like 60% of the jobs will be jobs that don't even exist right now. The world is changing so fast. 

That's true now in the analytics field, such as data managers, chief data officers – those positions did not exist 20 years ago. This will keep happening. How are kids supposed to know what options are out there? Unfortunately, universities and colleges aren't necessarily connected to that all the time. They're more focused on academia, so having another organization that can really say, hey, there's all these jobs – if you like these kinds of classes, here's roughly 18 different careers you could have.

I was really excited when I learned about this committee and joined it as a member and now I'm the chair. It really is important, especially after working in the government and understanding how things work.

We work on connecting people in the government with INFORMS resources that can help them do things better. There's often a disconnect, that is, there's often not enough expertise in the agencies to generate models or even to think about what kind of modeling should be used.

The Advocacy and Governance Committee is about trying to bring operations research and analytics to the attention of policymakers, including agency staff. We're mostly focused on federal level now, just in terms of bandwidth. Work has been done on Capitol Hill, getting language into bills about funding and including analytics in basic STEM items.

I've driven us more toward working with the agencies and trying to find champions within agencies who are interested in doing more with analytics but don't have the capacity internally. No one's going to have the broad expertise that INFORMS has internally, so we are positioning INFORMS as a resource. That includes nominating members for federal advisory committees. During COVID-19, we saw a lot of collaboration and coordination between researchers and government agencies, and we want to build on that.

The question now is, how do we find the right people in each agency and then facilitate those connections between what that agency needs and the members that might be interested in helping?

The 30-second pitch is: If you're interested in helping the public sector, helping people within the government make better decisions, but you don't want to leave your day job, this is a way that you can do that as an INFORMS member. INFORMS is taking a lot of the hard work away in terms of finding the right places, identifying the opportunities and making the connections. The idea is that those relationships can flourish under whatever terms make sense for that situation. It’s an opening for INFORMS members, who are in academia or the private sector, who have great knowledge and experience that could help the agencies, to work directly with those folks to provide their expertise.

I have been to a lot of conferences, and one thing about INFORMS that you need to know if you're a first-time attendee is that it is very, very, very, very big. There is a lot of technical overlap between the sessions, and it can be very overwhelming if you just scroll through all the talks and try to decide. My advice is to find a society or a section to focus on; usually each society or section has a track, and they're in the same room the whole time. That way, you can find a home base, at least for your first meeting. That’s really how I came into INFORMS. My professor (Paul Fischebeck) was in the Decision Analysis Society when I was at Carnegie Mellon and I came with him and attended those session. Then, over time, I realized there was this larger organization around me. But the first couple of times I really was just in that one room. There's a small group of us that were all in grad school at the time; we called ourselves the Third Generation because decision analysis as a discipline had been around for about 30 years at that point. We're all still part of DAS and we all still come together. Now, they all have trained students and the field has spread out more. And a lot of the luminaries in the field were still coming to the meetings. It was just such a just a great environment. Everyone has the expertise that you need. Everyone has their own thoughts and give you feedback. I also encourage people to present, if you find your right place and present, it's a great place to get that kind of feedback. My advice is to find one or two tracks to go to; trying to cover the whole conference is too overwhelming.

To me, the Decision Analysis Society is really the whole reason I'm part of INFORMS. It is such a great community –and we have a journal! It's a surprisingly small community for as big as the field is. But a lot of people also come in from other sections. Decision analysis is more of a framework than specific quantitative tool, so it can be used in collaboration with operations research and other sections as well.

When we lived there, my kids were little and we loved the FDR Memorial. It's near the Tidal Basin where the cherry blossoms are, but a little bit off the beaten path. It's great for little kids because there are lots of walkways, lots to look at, but not as crowded as some of the other monuments.

Having a meal with my family, yoga, walking outside with the dogs and then some kind of small social gathering with friends.

One thing that I haven't talked about in a long time, because now I've been at the same place for a long time. By the time I turned 30, I lived in nine states and the District of Columbia. And since then, I've lived in two more states. I think moving around has added to my curiosity and interest in seeing how things are done in different places and how cultures differ.