Researchers analysed an online survey completed by 165 of 1,751 invited graduates between December 2024 and January 2025. The participants had studied biomedical science, dental hygiene, nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, radiology nursing or social work. The survey formed part of a larger longitudinal project concerning health-promoting factors during education and early careers, although the analysis reported here used a cross-sectional design to examine work experiences, health, well-being and intention to remain at the three-year stage after graduation.

The questionnaire included the Work Experience Measurement Scale, the 13-item Sense of Coherence scale and the Salutogenic Health Indicator Scale. It also asked respondents about general health, well-being, physical activity, daily activity, sleep quality and their intention to remain in the profession. Investigators analysed the responses using descriptive statistics, non-parametric tests and regression analyses. Their main finding was that higher total Work Experience Measurement Scale scores were associated with better general health, better well-being and a greater intention to remain in the profession.

The results differed when individual work experiences were considered. Supportive work conditions and internal work experiences were most strongly associated with the intention to remain in the profession. Autonomy displayed a distinct pattern: it was associated with enhanced health and well-being, but the study did not find a direct association with intention to remain. The findings therefore connect different features of working life with different reported outcomes, rather than showing that every aspect of a positive workplace has the same relationship with professional staying intentions.

Intentions also varied by age group. Respondents aged 30–36 years reported a lower intention to remain in the profession than participants in both younger and older groups. The authors described this result as suggesting a potential need for targeted support during that stage of working life. They did not demonstrate that age caused the difference, nor did the study establish that supportive conditions or autonomy produced changes in health, well-being or professional intentions.

The research is observational and cross-sectional, limiting its ability to establish causality or describe changes over time. Only 165 people responded out of 1,751 invited graduates, so the findings may not represent all participants in the original cohort. The data also came from one survey period, December 2024 to January 2025. Despite these limitations, the results provide evidence of associations between early-career work experiences and several outcomes relevant to healthcare and social work: general health, well-being and the intention to remain in the profession. The authors concluded that positive work experiences may be important in supporting these outcomes and supported considering early-career support, sustainable leadership and supportive work conditions within workforce strategies across the professions studied.

Subject of Research: Associations between early-career work experiences, health, well-being and intention to remain among healthcare and social work professionals

Article Title: Associations between work experiences, health, well-being, and intention to remain in the profession among healthcare and social work professionals – a multicentre cross-sectional study

Article References: Andersson Hammar, I., Pennbrant, S., Nunstedt, H., Ahlstrand, I., Ekman, A., Hallgren, J., Larsson, I., Larsson, M., Lood, Q., Sundler, A. J., & Johnsen, A. M. (2026). Associations between work experiences, health, well-being, and intention to remain in the profession among healthcare and social work professionals – a multicentre cross-sectional study. BMC Health Services Research, 26(1), Article 1284. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15575-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15575-y

Keywords: work experiences, healthcare professionals, social work, professional intention, workplace support, autonomy, well-being, early career, cross-sectional study, Associations, between, work

The project, which began in July 2026 and will run through late June 2027, will introduce and evaluate Circles of Care, described as the first U.S. adaptation of the Family Group Conferencing model for dementia care. Family Group Conferencing is a structured decision-making approach that originated in child welfare and family services, in which a trained coordinator convenes the members of a person’s family and wider social network to plan together for that person’s wellbeing. Chen’s study will test whether the same principles can be applied to the distinct challenges posed by progressive cognitive decline, when care decisions multiply over years and the emotional and logistical burdens on families intensify.

Although approaches of this kind have shown promise in other countries, including the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, this will be the first study to evaluate how a social network-centered approach can strengthen dementia care in the United States. That gap matters, researchers argue, because dementia care in America has traditionally been organized around the individual caregiver, most often a spouse or adult child, rather than around the family system and community that surrounds the person living with the disease. The result, in many households, is a single overwhelmed caregiver carrying responsibilities that could be distributed more sustainably across a wider circle of relatives, friends and neighbors.

Guided by a trained coordinator, Circles of Care brings together family members and trusted members of a person’s social network to develop a shared care plan, strengthen supportive relationships and coordinate caregiving responsibilities. The coordinator’s role is central to the model. Rather than prescribing solutions, the facilitator prepares participants for the meeting, ensures that the voice and preferences of the person living with dementia remain at the center of the conversation, and helps the group translate its discussion into concrete, actionable arrangements, from transportation and respite schedules to decisions about medical appointments and future planning.

The technical logic of the model rests on a growing body of social science indicating that caregiving outcomes depend not only on the amount of help available but on how that help is organized. When responsibilities are negotiated explicitly among network members, rather than assumed by default by one person, caregivers report lower strain and families report better communication. Structured conferencing formalizes that negotiation, creating a documented plan and a recurring forum in which it can be revised as the disease progresses. For dementia, a condition that can span a decade or more, that built-in adaptability is a crucial design feature.

The project will evaluate whether Circles of Care is feasible and acceptable for diverse families, a question of particular importance in a country as demographically varied as the United States. Cultural norms shape who is expected to provide care, how decisions are made within families, and how comfortable relatives are discussing difficult topics such as driving, finances and residential transitions. A model imported from European practice cannot simply be transplanted; it must be adapted so that facilitation, meeting structures and planning tools resonate with families from different cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Chen’s team will treat acceptability across diverse populations as a core outcome, not an afterthought.

Beyond feasibility and acceptability, the study will measure whether the intervention enhances confidence, empowerment through supportive relationships, collaboration and social connectedness, while reducing caregiver burden and isolation. These outcomes reflect a dual theory of change. First, the conferencing process is expected to distribute practical tasks more evenly, easing the measurable burden carried by primary caregivers. Second, and perhaps more distinctively, the process is expected to strengthen the relational fabric of the network itself, so that caregivers feel less alone and participants feel more empowered to offer help. Social isolation among dementia caregivers is a well-documented risk factor for depression, burnout and even premature placement of the person with dementia in residential care, making connectedness an outcome worth measuring in its own right.

The stakes of this research are considerable. Tens of millions of Americans provide unpaid care to adults with dementia, and that informal workforce is the backbone of the national long-term care system. As the population ages, the number of people living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias is projected to rise sharply, placing escalating pressure on families, health systems and public budgets. Interventions that mobilize existing social networks, rather than requiring new professional resources for every family, offer a potentially scalable path forward. If Circles of Care proves feasible and effective, the model could be adopted by area agencies on aging, social work practitioners and community organizations across the country.

The grant also reflects a broader shift in gerontological research toward strengths-based and person-centered approaches. Rather than framing families primarily as stressed systems in need of clinical management, network-centered models treat them as reservoirs of capacity, knowledge and commitment that simply lack a structure for coordination. The conferencing format supplies that structure: a protected space, a neutral facilitator and a clear expectation that the family, not an outside authority, owns the plan. Advocates of the approach argue that plans produced this way are more durable, because the people who must carry them out are the people who designed them.

For Chen and her team, the year-long funding period will be devoted to building the U.S. adaptation, working with families, and generating the preliminary evidence needed to determine whether a larger trial is warranted. By harnessing the power of social relationships, the project has the potential, in the words of the university’s announcement, to transform how dementia care is supported in communities across the United States. If the promise holds, the future of dementia care may look less like a single exhausted caregiver and more like a circle: a coordinated, resilient network of the people who know and love the person living with the disease, equipped with a shared plan and the confidence to carry it forward together.

Subject of Research: Adapting the Family Group Conferencing model to support families of persons living with dementia in the United States

Article Title: Chen adapting the family and group conferencing model to care families of persons living with dementia

Article References: Chen adapting the family and group conferencing model to care families of persons living with dementia. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: dementia care, Family Group Conferencing, Circles of Care, Li-Mei Chen, George Mason University, caregiver burden, social networks, gerontology, social work, Virginia Center on Aging, caregiving, family-centered care

The research, published online on October 9 in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, was conducted by Aislinn Conrad, an associate professor in the university’s School of Social Work and a former child protective services investigator. Her paper, titled “Centering survivor agency in AI for violence prevention,” lays out a framework for how agencies should govern the deployment of machine learning in high-stakes, life-altering decisions. The study arrives at a moment when the gap between technological adoption and ethical oversight in public agencies is widening, and it offers one of the most concrete sets of recommendations yet for closing that gap.

Conrad’s argument rests on a technical reality that data scientists know well but that policymakers often overlook: machine learning models are only as fair as the historical data on which they are trained. When an algorithm is fed decades of child welfare records, it does not merely learn patterns of abuse. It learns patterns of surveillance. Families living in poverty, families of color, and families already entangled with public assistance systems appear in those records far more often, not necessarily because they are more likely to harm their children, but because they are more likely to be watched, reported, and investigated in the first place. A model trained on this skewed record will reproduce the skew, and it will do so at a scale and speed no human caseworker ever could.

“When historical data shows that poor families and families of color have been disproportionately surveilled by child welfare systems, the algorithm learns that pattern and repeats it at scale, and does so invisibly,” Conrad says. “A ‘neutral’ algorithm trained on biased data is just biased automation.” The word “invisibly” carries particular weight here. Unlike a human investigator, whose reasoning can be questioned, documented, and appealed, an algorithmic risk score often arrives as an opaque number. Families flagged by such systems may never learn why they were flagged, and caseworkers themselves may not understand the model’s inner workings well enough to challenge its output.

Conrad’s perspective is shaped by years in the field. As a social worker in a rural region of south-central Kansas, an area where drug use and poverty were prevalent, she conducted child protective services investigations and helped children in foster care safely reunite with their families. It was there that she began to notice a troubling correlation between economic hardship and system involvement. “I saw the link between poverty and abuse over and over, and I began wondering, ‘Is it really that poor kids are just more likely to be abused? Or is it a surveillance issue because they come to the attention of social services more often?'” she recalls. That question, born of frontline experience, now sits at the heart of her academic work on algorithmic governance in welfare systems.

The framework she proposes rests on three pillars. The first is what she calls putting people before automation: families and survivors must have meaningful input into how AI systems are used, must understand why an algorithm has flagged them, and must be able to contest decisions that affect them. This principle, often described in the technical literature as procedural transparency and contestability, transforms the algorithm from an unaccountable judge into an advisory tool whose outputs remain subject to human review. The second pillar is systematic bias auditing. Before an agency deploys an AI system, Conrad argues, it should be evaluated for fairness across demographic groups, and those evaluations should be repeated on a regular schedule, because model performance can drift as populations and data distributions change over time.

The third pillar is perhaps the most provocative: use AI to reduce surveillance rather than expand it. Instead of deploying machine learning to detect and monitor supposedly risky families, agencies could train models to identify communities where housing instability, caregiver stress, or inadequate services are most severe, and then direct resources toward those needs. Under this vision, the same computational power that might otherwise generate watchlists becomes an engine for proactive support, connecting vulnerable people with housing, childcare, and services before crises occur. “The goal shouldn’t be more monitoring of vulnerable families,” Conrad says. “It should be whether the technology genuinely improves access to services and outcomes for families.”

The recommendations could not be more timely for Iowa. In February, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services announced a partnership with Google to develop VISION, a new information system that uses AI to modernize how child welfare agencies manage cases and data. Conrad warns that systems like VISION, however well intentioned, carry the risk of unintentional misuse. Data points such as receipt of public assistance, housing instability, or previous contacts with social service agencies could be interpreted by an algorithm as indicators of risk, subjecting families already facing economic or social hardship to heightened scrutiny. What begins as an efficiency upgrade could, without guardrails, become an amplifier of existing disparities.

The stakes extend well beyond one state. AI-assisted decision-making in child welfare, elder abuse detection, and intimate partner violence response can trigger investigations, family separations, and long-term involvement with state systems, consequences that are difficult to reverse. Researchers in the emerging field of algorithmic fairness have documented similar dynamics in predictive policing, credit scoring, and hiring, where models trained on historically biased outcomes perpetuate discrimination under a veneer of mathematical objectivity. Social services present an especially acute version of the problem because the populations involved are among the least equipped to challenge automated decisions, lacking the legal resources, technical literacy, and institutional power that contestability requires.

“AI can make us more efficient and effective, but only if we’re willing to do the hard work of developing responsive systems that keep families safe without reproducing bias,” Conrad says. “That’s why I believe AI-safeguard frameworks are so critical right now.” Her study, which she authored as sole researcher and self-funded, offers agencies a practical starting point: keep humans in the loop for consequential decisions, audit algorithms for discriminatory outcomes before and after deployment, and orient the technology toward connecting people with resources rather than watching them more closely. As public agencies across the country race to modernize with AI, the study serves as a reminder that efficiency without equity is not progress, and that the families these systems are built to protect deserve both the benefits of new technology and the preservation of human judgment, dignity, and voice.

Subject of Research: Safeguards and ethical frameworks for artificial intelligence use in social service and child welfare agencies

Article Title: Social service agencies need safeguards when using AI

Article References: Social service agencies need safeguards when using AI. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: artificial intelligence, social work, child welfare, algorithmic bias, surveillance, machine learning fairness, University of Iowa, violence prevention, public policy, survivor agency, child protective services, AI ethics

The authors frame their inquiry against a sobering backdrop: attempted and completed suicide is described as rising both in South Africa and globally. Much of the existing scholarship and clinical effort, they note, has concentrated on identifying the causes of suicidal behavior and on the treatment and rehabilitation of the person who attempted suicide. Families, by contrast, have received what the researchers call peripheral attention. That imbalance matters because families are not passive bystanders. They are the immediate care environment, the first line of monitoring, and often the only continuous support available once formal treatment ends. If the family system is destabilized, the recovery environment for the patient is destabilized with it.

To investigate what families actually experience, the researchers adopted a qualitative approach operating within the phenomenological tradition. Phenomenology is a design built to capture lived experience in its own terms: rather than testing hypotheses about variables, it asks what a phenomenon feels like from the inside and what meanings people attach to it. In this study, that meant asking families to describe, in their own words, what life has been like since the suicide attempt. The design is well suited to an underexplored topic, because it allows the researchers to surface categories of difficulty that pre-existing checklists and diagnostic instruments might never have anticipated.

The sampling strategy was purposive, meaning participants were deliberately chosen for their direct relevance to the research question rather than at random. Five families living with persons who had attempted suicide were recruited, alongside ten social workers who encounter these situations professionally. The inclusion of both groups is methodologically significant. Families provide the experiential account of the aftermath, while social workers provide the service-delivery perspective, revealing what support is currently offered, what is asked of families, and where the system falls short. Triangulating these two vantage points allows the study to compare what families need with what the profession actually provides.

Data collection relied on semi-structured interviews, a technique that combines a prepared interview guide with the freedom to probe unexpected themes as they emerge. This flexibility is crucial in sensitive research: a rigid questionnaire might miss the moment when a participant reveals, unprompted, that they no longer know how to speak to their own child. The interview transcripts were then analyzed using Thematic Content Analysis, a systematic procedure in which researchers code the data, group codes into candidate themes, and refine those themes until they form a coherent map of the participants’ experiences. The result is a set of interlocking challenges that describe the family’s condition after a suicide attempt.

The first and most consequential finding concerns psychological destabilization. Families reported that the aftermath of the attempt undermined their psychological well-being, a formulation that captures the persistent anxiety, hypervigilance, and emotional exhaustion that come with living alongside someone who has previously tried to end their life. In clinical terms, the suicide attempt functions as a traumatic event not only for the attempter but for the entire household, producing a state in which ordinary family life is reorganized around the possibility of another attempt. The study’s contribution is to document this destabilization from the family’s own perspective, within the South African context, where such documentation has been scarce.

The second finding concerns communication. Families described how the aftermath of the attempt damaged their patterns of interaction, leaving them struggling to hold meaningful conversations with the person who had attempted suicide. This is a subtle but profound disruption. Communication is the mechanism through which families monitor risk, express care, and negotiate the practical business of daily life. When meaningful dialogue collapses, relatives may avoid mentioning the attempt for fear of triggering another crisis, while the attempter may interpret the silence as stigma or rejection. The household becomes caught in a loop of careful, guarded exchanges that satisfy no one and protect no one, a dynamic the study identifies as a core challenge requiring professional attention.

Perhaps the most striking finding is structural: the researchers found no dedicated social work services for families of suicide attempters. The irony the study exposes is sharp. Families were, in practice, drawn into the professional process, asked to share detailed information about the family setting so that the social worker could better understand the patient. In other words, the family was treated as a source of clinical data about someone else, while receiving no parallel service addressing its own needs. The family’s knowledge was extracted; the family’s distress was not treated. This asymmetry reveals a gap in the architecture of aftercare, one that the authors argue is both unnecessary and fixable.

The social workers themselves did not dispute the gap. According to the study, they acknowledged the situation and committed to providing aftercare services to help families navigate the aftermath of an attempted suicide. That commitment, the authors suggest, is the seed of a reimagined professional scope. Rather than treating the suicide attempter as an isolated clinical case, social work could adopt holistic interventions that include both the patient and the family as legitimate service recipients. Concretely, that would mean family-focused counseling to repair communication patterns, psychosocial support to address the household’s psychological destabilization, and structured aftercare that continues after the acute crisis has passed. The findings, the authors write, are fundamental in assisting social workers to rethink the scope of their services in exactly this direction.

The study carries implications well beyond the five households it examined. Globally, suicide prevention strategies increasingly recognize that families are both protective resources and hidden casualties, yet service systems in many countries, including South Africa, still route support almost exclusively to the individual patient. By documenting the family’s experience through a rigorous phenomenological lens and by naming the absence of dedicated services, Ngoveni and Sekudu provide the evidentiary basis for policy and practice change. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa, in accordance with guidelines set by the National Health Research Ethics Council, and obtained written and verbal informed consent from participants, an important marker of rigor in research on such a sensitive topic. The authors declare no funding was received for the work and report no competing interests. What remains is the challenge the study poses to the profession: a family that has lived through a suicide attempt is not merely a context for someone else’s treatment. It is a unit of care in its own right, and until social work services are designed for it, the aftermath of every attempt will continue to ripple through South African homes largely unaddressed.

Subject of Research: Challenges faced by families of suicide attempt survivors and the role of social work intervention in South Africa

Article Title: Challenges faced by families living with persons who have attempted suicide and the need for social work intervention in South Africa

Article References: Ngoveni, S., & Sekudu, J. (2026). Challenges faced by families living with persons who have attempted suicide and the need for social work intervention in South Africa. Discover Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-026-00601-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44192-026-00601-6

Keywords: attempted suicide, families, social work, South Africa, mental health, aftercare services, psychological well-being, family communication, qualitative research, phenomenology, holistic intervention, suicide prevention

The scale of Ohio’s shortage of licensed behavioral health providers is difficult to overstate, particularly in rural and low-income communities. Residents in these areas may wait months for an appointment, travel long distances to reach a clinician, or go without care entirely during a crisis. The scholarship program is engineered to close that gap not simply by training more clinicians, but by training and retaining clinicians who are committed to working where the need is greatest. Every student who accepts a scholarship must sign a binding service agreement committing to work in an eligible underserved Ohio community for a period equal to the number of years they receive scholarship support. It is a model borrowed, in spirit, from loan-forgiveness frameworks in medicine, but applied here at the graduate level and targeted specifically at mental health and substance use treatment.

The qualifying employment settings read like a map of Ohio’s safety net. Scholars may fulfill their commitment at community behavioral health centers, federally qualified health centers, school-based health clinics, and child advocacy centers. They may also serve at behavioral health providers participating in OhioRISE, a specialized managed care program for youth with complex behavioral health and multisystem needs, or at nonprofit providers where Medicaid is the primary payer. By anchoring the service requirement to these settings, the state is directing its investment toward children, youth, and underserved populations — the groups most likely to fall through the cracks when the clinical workforce thins out.

At the University of Cincinnati, the program is a deliberate collaboration across three disciplines: social work, mental health counseling, and clinical psychology. The university will receive approximately $1.2 million in scholarship funding, and eligible graduate students may receive full in-state tuition coverage for fall 2026. Notably, tuition may be reimbursed retroactively after a student is accepted into the scholarship program, a provision that could deliver immediate financial relief to students who have already paid for the current term. Scholarships may also be eligible for renewal in spring 2027, fall 2027, and spring 2028, giving students a multi-year funding runway through the completion of their degrees.

The tuition scholarships are only part of the financial architecture. An additional $2.5 million is available through an independent agreement with Health Impact Ohio to fund $4,000 internship stipends paid directly to students during their field placements. Field placements — the supervised clinical practicums that graduate trainees must complete before licensure — are typically unpaid or minimally paid, forcing many students to work outside jobs while accumulating clinical hours. Direct stipends during placements remove one more economic obstacle between students and clinical training, and they signal that the state views the practicum year as work of genuine public value rather than a rite of passage to be endured.

For program leadership at UC, the timing is not incidental. Dana Harley, PhD, project director for the OBHS Program at UC, professor and master of social work program director, pointed to the changing federal landscape of graduate financing. Providing these scholarships will reduce the educational debt of students, she said, which is extremely important at a time when federal graduate student loans have been limited due to legislative changes. The remark underscores a structural tension in the behavioral health pipeline: clinical careers in community settings rarely pay enough to service heavy graduate debt, and when federal borrowing becomes less available, students from modest backgrounds may be priced out of the professions entirely. Scholarships that erase tuition, paired with placement stipends, are a direct countermeasure. We are delighted to train these future clinicians to provide services to some of the most vulnerable populations in Ohio, Harley said.

Eligibility is defined tightly. Accelerated, full-time, and part-time graduate students who are currently enrolled qualify, but incoming students do not — a design choice that channels the first wave of funding to students already embedded in Ohio’s training programs and closest to entering the workforce. Three UC programs are included. The Master of Social Work in the College of Allied Health Sciences integrates classroom learning with a field practicum, building clinical skills in assessment, intervention, and case management, and prepares graduates to pursue licensure as licensed social workers and licensed independent social workers in Ohio. The Master of Arts in mental health counseling, housed in the College of Education, Criminal Justice, Human Services and Information Technology, trains students to provide individual, group, and family counseling across a range of mental health and substance use concerns, grounded in culturally responsive, evidence-based practice, with supervised clinical practica that lead toward licensure as licensed professional counselors.

The third UC pathway is the doctorate in Clinical Psychology in the College of Arts & Sciences, which offers rigorous training in psychological assessment, evidence-based intervention, and applied research. Doctoral students complete supervised clinical hours across a range of populations and settings, culminating in an American Psychological Association-accredited internship before graduation, and emerge prepared for licensure as psychologists and for careers spanning clinical practice and academic research. Amanda La Guardia, PhD, professor and counseling program coordinator, noted that the clinical counseling program in the School of Human Services has a consistent record of interprofessional collaboration across campus, resulting in supportive grant funding for students as they study to become professional counselors throughout Ohio. That cross-campus coordination — social work, counseling, and psychology drawing on a single pool of state scholarship dollars — is itself a technical achievement, requiring aligned eligibility criteria, coordinated advising, and shared reporting to state agencies.

The application process is deliberately simple in structure. Current graduate students interested in the scholarship apply through their respective programs, and the application includes a personal statement explaining why the student is interested in working with Ohio populations from disadvantaged backgrounds. That requirement does more than filter for commitment; it frames the entire program around a question of vocation. The state is not merely buying clinical labor with tuition dollars — it is identifying students whose professional identities are already oriented toward underserved communities and removing the financial friction that might otherwise push them toward higher-paying private practice. If the model works, the returns compound: each scholarship year purchased is a service year delivered in a community behavioral health center, a school-based clinic, or a child advocacy center, precisely where Ohio’s shortage is sharpest. For a state confronting a behavioral health crisis with a thinning clinical workforce, the $18 million wager is that the fastest route to more care is not more buildings or more programs, but more people — trained, licensed, and rooted in the communities that need them most.

Subject of Research: A statewide Ohio scholarship program to expand and retain the behavioral health clinical workforce

Article Title: University of Cincinnati part of $18 million statewide initiative to expand behavioral health workforce

Article References: University of Cincinnati part of $18 million statewide initiative to expand behavioral health workforce. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: behavioral health, workforce development, Ohio Behavioral Health Scholarship, University of Cincinnati, mental health workforce shortage, social work, mental health counseling, clinical psychology, graduate scholarships, underserved communities, substance use treatment, OhioRISE