167 - Nicky Sullivan: Bridging the Gap Between Academic Research and Real-World Impact

0:01Welcome to the Stanford Psychology Podcast, where leading psychologists come to share their most recent work. I'm Angie, and for this week's episode, I'm very excited to share my conversation with Dr. Nikki Sullivan as a part of our Psychologists in the Wild series. In this series, we interview psychology PhDs who have decided to leave academia and pursue other career paths. Dr. Sullivan received his PhD from Stanford Psychology Department in 2024. During his PhD, he studied parents and children's belief about race and racial inequality. He is now a senior researcher at Impact Justice, a national nonprofit innovation and research center focused on transforming the U.S.

0:43criminal justice system. In this episode, Nicky shares his journey from studying race in the lab to evaluating innovative initiatives like the Homecoming Project at Impact Justice. He offers practical advice for grad students on networking while reflecting on the challenges of pursuing system reform in today's shifting political landscape. Without further ado, here's our conversation.

1:29Thank you so much for joining our show today, Nikki. It's so good to have you back. Well, somewhat virtually. So you graduated last year, and we're definitely missing you here in the developmental area. And for today's episode, I wanted to ask, what have you been up to? Yeah, well, first of all, Andy, so good to get virtually, I guess, but be back and get to see you. I miss my whole developmental family very much. But yeah, I've been up to some stuff that I also think is pretty fun. So for the last, I guess it's seven months now, good chunk of time, I have been working at a nonprofit called Impact Justice as a senior researcher as part of the Research and Action Center.

2:14So Impact Justice in general, we'll start big, is a criminal legal system reform nonprofit. it. So a lot of what we do is run different programs that are either trying to help people avoid interactions with the legal system in the first place, improve the experience of people while they're incarcerated, and then either transition back out of prison, back into society for people who are exiting some form of incarceration. So we have a bunch of different programs that we run. And then I'm part of a really small group called the Research and Action center. It's a small but mighty team of four at the moment.

2:47And basically, we provide a bunch of support across all those programs and even outside the organization. And really, program evaluation research is our kind of main avenue of work. So really what that means is that we're working with the different programs we run to try and figure out, okay, what's working well? Is this running smoothly? Is it having the outcomes that we're hoping, right? Because we might have an idea at impact justice, try out this program to achieve a goal. And then we're here to say, okay, are we actually achieving that goal? You know, are we making it easier for people in some aspect of re-entry?

3:22Are we improving people's experiences while they're incarcerated? And if so, how could we even do it better? So that's most of the work that we do. We do that, I'll say though, both internally. So for the programs that we run at impact justice, but also externally. So we'll do contracts with other nonprofits that kind of want to know is what we're doing working smoothly or not um or even a lot of like county governments which is kind of a big site of where a lot of this criminal legal system work happens for them to say hey we're trying something we don't have kind of the expertise to figure out is this working so they'll have us come in and do a similar work um and then also that we do do some original research um so sometimes kind of separate from a specific program.

4:06So a couple of years ago, we published some collection of pieces of work on the experience of men who have traumatic experiences and how that influences their cultural experience and how they might have ended up having interactions with law enforcement or the cultural system in the first place. So that's kind of a high, broad overview, but we can definitely dig into more of that. Yeah, this is so cool. And I have so many questions, But I guess I just wanted to start with, can you give us examples of what a program looks like for people who are not very familiar in this area of work? Yeah, absolutely.

4:46So one program, which is one that I'm working with right now, so it's fresh of mind, is called the Homecoming Project. It's been running for like seven or eight years now. Started in the Bay and then it's moved kind of in the last year or two down to Los Angeles as well. It's basically solving for a problem of people who have been incarcerated for a while and are returning to society, but are returning to a society that's like really different than the one that they left. So what it does is it takes people who have been incarcerated for at least 10 consecutive years and then pairs them with someone in the community that they're returning to who have a spare room in their home and is willing to have that person stay, the person who's returning, stay in their home for up to six months so they can sort of get back on their feet.

5:31And while that person is then staying in that person's home, we're providing kind of case management, meaning we're helping them figure out, like, how do you get a driver's license? How can we help you maybe pursue education that you want to or get a job or, you know, we can do this for up to six months. How are you going to find housing after this and kind of all this sort of stuff? Right. Because if you imagine even 10 years back, but the average person who is in Homecoming Project has been incarcerated for over 20 years. So like, just imagine leaving society in 2003, being incarcerated for 20 some odd years, and then coming back and being like, what the heck is an iPhone?

6:06Like, holy cow, internet is everywhere. Like, everything is so different. And so having to adapt just takes so much time. And so helping those people by having them have a really stable base that they can then kind of build from and learn from and not just kind of be thrown back into reentry. Their idea is that that'll help those people long term be able to kind of build on that early foundation and really create a productive life back in society and not kind of be completely overwhelmed or at least have support while they might be feeling overwhelmed. Wait, that is so cool. I have to say this is an angle that I never thought about, like, because sometimes you read about people sentencing being 20 years and you will first reaction is that's a long time.

6:49But then like people live well beyond the 20 years. And then the question is, what's next? So you mentioned earlier that most of your work is about program evaluation. So can you say more about what's your role in this program? Yeah, exactly. So basically, we as the kind of the Research and Action Center team and me as a part of that will partner with our different programs kind of at often regular intervals. It depends on the joys of funding sometimes, but at regular intervals to kind of work with them to figure out kind of what questions do they have. And so that often varies a lot over the course of a program.

7:26So like take the homecoming project, for instance. Early on, we're often planning support for them to think about, OK, what data might you want to track? about your program so that you can have that over time. You know, what are you thinking about how you want to implement it? Or how did the first, you know, maybe six months of trying to implement this program go? Like, what was your vision for it? And helping them think, here's our vision. Okay, did we execute that? What worked? What didn't? Kind of really digging into the roots of it. And so that might involve talking to the program staff, talking to some of the early participants, things like that.

8:00Over time, we might then kind of look a little bit more at outcomes, right? So not just the process of how are they doing this work, but what are the outcomes of this? Where do people go when they leave the Homecoming Project? Do they, you know, have a job? Do they have stable housing that they're able to move into? And then further on in the life cycle of a project, we might be looking not kind of at the immediate outcomes, but what about the longer term? So that's some of the work that we're doing now as we're supporting Homecoming Project and thinking about, okay, it's been running for seven or eight years now.

8:31where are some of the people who participated in some of those early cohorts? Because the idea is not just to support people kind of while they're involved, but the core idea of a lot of our programs is that in being involved in some of these projects will help people in the moment, but will also help them build a more stable future. And so now that we have this longer timeframe, we can say, okay, did you build a more stable future? Did this program work in the long term? Which is what I think most of us care about. And it's also what kind of most of people who might hear about this program might be really interested to know.

9:01Yeah, definitely. Like I am really interested in it. Is there a story or any particular moments when you're working with this project that really leaves a big impression on you? I mean, I think it's been interesting because a lot of what I've been doing so far is trying to like get up to speed with what's been done in the past in this program. And a lot of that involves like going back in and reading the prior work that we've done and reading often the stories of people who we've talked to. And I think you can just see the impact that this has had on people's lives. So like one of the people that I work with who works at Impact Justice now is a former participant of the Homecoming project, right?

9:37So he was someone who was served by the program, had a really wonderful experience and has now come to work supporting people who are currently going through the project. And so I think just like hearing the stories that he has, both of his own experience and of being able to work with people and like, you know, you'll see these people coming into our office and doing meetings and just the clear joy that they have for having gotten this opportunity that unfortunately most people are not given. And just the appreciation they have for all the work that the entire homecoming team does and the people who hosted them did and coming them into their homes.

10:13I think it's like, but the researcher side of me is very much like, all right, we do need the data we got to see. But the human side of me looking at this, it's very easy to quickly see like, okay, Like, clearly this is doing something for people's lives. And we just maybe it helps to quantify it, but it's pretty obvious that there's something positive going on here. Yeah, this is such a heartwarming story. I want to switch topic a little bit. So you mentioned a lot about like what you're working on, but can you give us a kind of examples of what is a typical day or a week that looks like for you?

10:45Or is there a typical day for you? Yeah, it's a great question. And I feel like it's in some ways a little similar to grad school and that like typical day, typical week, like, yeah, yes and no. Right. Some weeks are doing a bunch of this. Some weeks are doing a bunch of that. But yeah, I think I can talk about kind of the types of work that we do across the life cycle of a project, because I think that is similar to grad school. Right. And that if you're in the design stages of a new idea, what you're working on is going to be very different than if you're kind of in the thick of it or writing it up.

11:15um so often um we're working on kind of a handful of projects at once similar to grad school right so in this current moment i'm i'm leading four different evaluations that are at different stages and kind of providing some support on a couple of others which like probably sound just like grad school right you got a couple things going that's that's not that different from being an academic um so sometimes i'll be doing a lot of like design work right so this is thinking about okay, how do we want to go about this, right? How do we want to measure long-term impact and try to think about, okay, who might we be able to get access to?

11:49How might we be able to get access to them? Also then getting into, okay, we've decided to now do some surveys and some interviews. You still got to design the survey, put together the interview protocol, kind of that sort of stuff in the early phases. Often that also involves a lot of conversations with the program staff because, right, like to understand both what their needs are and to really understand their program from their perspectives, because we are coming in not fully from the outside, but sort of as an outsider who's not really there in the day to day. So really trying to build that understanding.

12:21So lots of conversations all the time. I have endless questions for all of my colleagues. Then there's sort of, right, like much like research in academia, like there's the data collection, right? We have to conduct the surveys, do interviews, do focus groups. And we're pretty much always doing mixed methods because I think we need kind of both the quantitative and the qualitative to understand the impact of these programs. So we have to go through that process of collecting all the data. And then also sometimes I'm in more of like an analysis heavy phase, right? So I'm right now there's one project where I'm just like digging my teeth into the data and trying to figure out what it's showing and doing that analysis and in are, writing code, trying to understand there.

13:02And then also at the end, it's, again, going to be kind of similar in some ways, right, that we're like writing up a report often to say, hey, here's what we found, or getting ready to present our findings to the program staff or sometimes someone external to say, hey, here's what we discovered in looking at this. So kind of that's the lifecycle of one project. So in any day or week, I might kind of pull in from a bunch of those different fun things. It does sound like quite similar to grad school. So then I guess I have to ask, what did you work on in grad school? Because if I remember correctly, you did not work on legal system related research.

13:40But for people who are not familiar with your work like I do, could you say more about what did you work on and how did you transition from that topic to what you are currently working on? Yeah, it is a great point. As, you know, we might have hinted at the fact that we do developmental psychology research at the beginning. It's a little bit different in some ways. Yeah, so my work in grad school was all centered around how children learn about race and racial inequality, especially in the context of how families and especially white families have conversations about race, racial inequality, and then police violence specifically.

14:18So like some of my work in grad school looked at, asked parents about the conversations they had with their children. We published some work about how those conversations changed or didn't from before George Floyd was murdered until immediately after his death. Also did some work like more directly with children. Having parents and children have a conversation about police violence. We would then like sit in and listen to that, hear what they had to say and try and understand how those conversations were changing children's beliefs. So I was very much working with like a different age range, first of all, right?

14:49Like now I'm mostly working with adults as opposed to eight-year-olds. But I think there are some through lines there, right? Like you heard me say that a lot of the stuff that I was interested in was the conversations about police violence. And so that there's kind of a clear link there. And so I think for me, the transition was throughout grad school and throughout my time in academia, I always knew that kind of a big part of the reason for me that I was choosing to do research is that I want to think about how we could use that research to drive impact and like help people out in the real world.

15:20And so that kind of was a focus of, OK, what questions am I interested in? It's why we kind of looked into some of these conversations to think, OK, maybe we can figure out how to support parents and having more conversations. conversations. And so as I was thinking about, okay, what's coming next after grad school, I was trying to think, all right, at the core of this is how do I see myself driving impact going forward, right? And obviously one path of that is staying in academia, continuing to do this research, share it out. But I think for me, I was looking for something that was a little more hands-on, a little more closely connected to the people I was actually trying to be impacting.

15:57And so that kind of drew me to looking at nonprofits, right? They're often driven by a specific mission that says, hey, we want to do this thing and help people in this way, improve society in this way. And because I'd kind of done all this work, both on racial inequality and on police violence, specifically, I think kind of I was looking for domains that intersected in some way, right? So I was looking at some nonprofits that were more in the education space, thinking about how are we teaching kids about race and inequality. But I was also looking for nonprofits and more of kind of this like legal system reform space, right?

16:33It would be really great if parents had to have fewer conversations about police violence because it wasn't happening as much, right? That's kind of a different angle to do similar work. And so when I saw this opportunity at Impact Justice, it seemed like, sir, it's a bit of a sidestep, but so deeply related to kind of the core of the work that I was doing, especially just racial inequality, was a driving piece of my work in grad school. And unfortunately, it is a kind of driving underpinning of our legal system right now. And so it seemed like a way to continue to do that work that was really inspiring to me.

17:05But out in the wild, as you say. Yeah, that is such an inspiring story to see how there's always this running themes in both your research and your current work. And I am quite curious, I think one of the exciting thing, or the challenge of it is that the change can be often really slow and systematic. So I'm quite curious in your, I guess, nine months, seven months at Impact Justice, have you already seen some of the examples of where your research can directly influence the policy or practice, or maybe a different way to ask these questions? Given that how slow changes could be, what is a good measure for success in this kind of work?

17:49Yeah, it's a really challenging question. And I think for me right now, like the key is to think about measuring success across multiple levels, right? Because like you said, the kind of systems level, policy level change often does happen really slowly. And so if that's kind of your only metric of success, a lot of the time you're going to kind of feel like, wow, we're not getting anywhere. But I think you can also see success by looking at individuals and their experiences, right? If we're keeping someone out of an interaction with the justice system in the first place, that's success. If we improve someone's experience while they're incarcerated and make it a little more livable for them, that's a success.

18:29If we make the transition out a little bit easier and help them reintegrate into society, that's a success. So I think oftentimes with the programs, what we're helping is measure those kind of smaller chunks of success of saying, hey, did your program help people's lives? And often we find that it does. And so that's kind of the baseline. I think at the same time, though, we are trying to work towards kind of this systemic change. Right. So one way we do that is by trying to expand the programs that we're trying elsewhere. So in general, Impact Justice is kind of an innovation center for these types of programs.

19:03So often what we're doing is trying to say, hey, no one else is doing this type of work. We think that there's a gap here, that we need to serve this population. We have an innovative way to do it. Let's try that. And so often if we find that kind of the innovation, this thing that we've tried is successful, then we might try and say, great, let's share this out to others. How can we share what we've learned here with other areas? Right. So like the homecoming project right now is only in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. But if we continue to see success, we might be able to think about how can we share that to other places around the country who might also want to do this?

19:37They might even see that, hey, we really like what they're doing over there. How could we implement that here? So that's one way to start to kind of broaden this measure of change and the change policy or at least broaden access to programs across the country. And I think, too, part of our role as the RAC, the Research and Action Center, is it's not just about doing research. It's also about driving action, right? So as we're doing both this program evaluation research and our original research, we might try and do some of that research with an eye towards saying, hey, here's an unjust policy.

20:09Here's something that we might want to draw attention to or begin to try and change. And so that obviously takes a much longer time. And so we're not seeing that type of change regularly. But if you build up enough of this small success, you can, I think, use that to try and argue for broader systems of change. Well, that makes a lot of sense. And I really like how you put it because measuring success is never this like success is never this like single dimension thing that some people tend to think of it. And I really like to think about how what your current work can impact individually instead of just thinking about the abstract, the high level thing.

20:45So going back to transitioning into your current role, I'm just quite curious, how did you find this job? Because I feel like we are in the Bay Area and there's a lot of tech companies. And I feel like for a lot of the tech companies, there's a very kind of well-defined path to it. You find a LinkedIn posting, you go to their very beautifully designed portal, you submit your application and you went through the whole pipeline. But I think for me personally, I have to admit that before you started working at Impact Justice, I have never heard of these organizations. And when you started working there, I was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense and also makes a lot of sense why you would work there.

21:28So I'm quite curious, could you share a little bit more about your story of finding this place? Like, did you just always know about it? Yeah, it's a really good question. And yeah, I can certainly relate to the challenges of a job search and finding kind of the right fit. I think one, like it took me time, right, to find this. And I kind of started fairly early in grad school trying to begin to like talk to different people. Or if I heard about something, I'd say, oh, can I learn more about that? What's going on there? And so I think it's a couple of things that kind of led me to impact justice.

22:02So one is just having conversations with folks who did interesting, right? Like at any opportunity, I think, you know, at a university, there's often lots of people who have different connections, both within academia, but also outside, right? Like plenty of researchers do work in partnership with nonprofits or sometimes with tech companies or with, right, all sorts of different entities who are trying something out. um so one thing i think is just starting to have those conversations wasn't how i ended up hearing specifically about impact justice but i heard about lots of interesting places that i've been you know had conversations with people or applied to a job at or different things so i think that's kind of one way to find stuff um i think specifically for kind of impact focused roles there were some um basically websites that aggregate different posting so one that i used a lot is called idealists um which nice little play on words it's for idealists who want to you know maybe make things but it's also a list of ideas of jobs you could have yeah i know i would like a couple weeks after i started using it that i the light bulb moment happened for me um but right so they will often kind of collect postings from different non-profits everywhere And to be honest, I have no idea how the internal of that work, I don't know if those places send them to Idealist or they, who knows, that's far beyond me.

23:26But that's kind of a way to see what is out there, what are these spaces? Because there's so many nonprofits doing all sorts of really cool different kind of work. So sometimes I had heard of them, sometimes I hadn't. I had heard briefly from Impact Justice, actually, from a cousin of mine who works in the criminal legal system reform space. And so I then saw a posting of them and I kind of pinged him and he was like, oh yeah, they do great work there. You should definitely do it. And sort of ended up being able to be connected with someone who worked at Impact Justice and kind of learned more about what they were doing.

23:56It's like, yes, that sounds like really amazing work. And then applied and ended up getting fortunate that they liked me in the same way that I liked them. That's awesome. So I guess maybe this is a related question. But for psychology students, grad students interested in what you are currently doing in policy related or nonprofit work, what would you recommend they start learning or doing like now as they're still in grad school? Yeah, I think the biggest thing of all is like start talking to people and building connections, right? Like think about what type of work you want to do and find people who do that work, right?

24:33There might be, for example, like alumni from your program who are doing work that you find interesting. And I think it's good to start by casting a wide net, right? Like, I'm not doing exact, like, the exact vision of what I might have thought while I was in my PhD was, right, like, working with children and race and something. Like, I'm not exactly in that tight sphere. But if you start broad, right, like, just talk to people who have different roles. I talk to people who worked at tech companies and more kind of equity and impact focused roles. I talk to people who worked in local government or the federal government or all these different places to see what's out there.