2021 Best Paper Award Competition
The College of Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management (HOCM) is pleased to announce the results of the 2021 Best Paper Award Competition.
This year, there were a total of 28 submissions to the competition with an impressive range of topics and uniformly high quality. We would like to thank all the authors for their valuable contribution to the field of HOCM.
We are also grateful to the following 23 referees who have helped review the submissions and determine the finalists and winners. It is through their valuable time and expertise that the success of the competition can be maintained:
Nezih Altay, Andy Arnette, Felipe Aros-Vera, Aruna Apte, Milad Baghersad, Karthik Balasubramanian, Burcu Balcik, Gemma Berenguer, Josey Chacko, Mahyar Eftekhar, Graham Heaslip, Marianne Jahre, Andres Jola-Sanchez, Telesilla Kotsi, Gyöngyi Kovacs, Adriana Leiras, Raktim Pal, Shabnam Rezapour, Sibel Salman, Ece Sanci, Shouqiang Wang, Kezban Yagci Sokat, and Chris Zobel.
The three finalist papers for this year's competition (in order of abstract numbers) were as follows:
1."Disaster Mitigation: Leveraging Community Involvement to Improve Water Access in Sub-Saharan Africa" by Chengcheng Zhai, Kurt Bretthauer, Jorge Mejia, and Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez.
2."No Panic in Pandemic: The Impact of Individual Choice on Public Health Policy and Vaccine Priority" by Anthony Zhenhuan Zheng, Miao Bai, Ying Cui, and Guangwen Kong.
3."The Role of Volunteer Experience on Performance of Online Volunteering Platforms" by Eunae Yoo and Gloria Urrea.
The runner-up of the competition this year:
"No Panic in Pandemic: The Impact of Individual Choice on Public Health Policy and Vaccine Priority" by Anthony Zhenhuan Zheng, Miao Bai, Ying Cui, and Guangwen Kong.
Summary of Reviewer Comments: The paper truly speaks to an important HOCM issue (as opposed to using HOCM as a motivation). A Technically well-done paper that is well-written, and interesting. Offers excellent and unique methodological applications. Theoretically very strong and integrates multiple methods in one framework. Attempts to answer a question in everybody's mind today.
Finally, the winning paper in this year's HOCM Best Paper competition is:
The Role of Volunteer Experience on Performance of Online Volunteering Platforms" by Eunae Yoo and Gloria Urrea.
Summary of Reviewer Comments: The paper involves an interesting dataset, impactful research questions, and well-specified models. It is extremely relevant to a current (pandemic-driven) reality of volunteerism. It outlines clear policy prescriptions for organizations seeking to engage online volunteers. Interesting problem, refreshingly honest assessment of results, well-defined research gap and inspiring future research directions.
