Bass Connections Team: Mental Health and the Justice System in Durham County (2025-2026)
Since 2016, Nicole Schramm-Sapyta has led a Bass Connections team exploring the intersection of mental health and the justice system, combining rigorous research with deep community engagement. What began as an effort to understand the opioid epidemic in Durham and beyond has grown into a long-term collaboration with Durham partners, including the Durham County Detention Facility, Justice Services Department and Crisis Intervention Team.
Schramm-Sapyta shared her perspective on leading a long-standing team with Kelly Harrison (Senior Academic Program Coordinator, Bass Connections) during an interview in Fall 2025.
What motivated you to propose a Bass Connections project, and how did it connect to your research?
My first project began in 2016 when a pharmacist colleague approached me while I was the administrator for the Brain & Society theme of Bass Connections. We were both interested in the opioid epidemic and wanted to understand different perspectives beyond our academic research. The program provided funding, student support and community connections, offering a meaningful way to conduct research that mattered to the community while working closely with students. That project allowed us to learn about the law enforcement perspective on the opioid epidemic, which facilitated connections and next steps in the project.
As we built relationships with community partners like the Crisis Intervention Team and detention facility, our goals became much more concrete and practical. We took advantage of Duke’s resources that allow us to use anonymized medical records for research. We were able to analyze mental health data in the jail population and have recently expanded to evaluating the effectiveness of programs in the detention facility.
This work has allowed me to move into entirely new fields of research and learn from my students and colleagues. Our team can now contribute meaningfully to the literature rather than just being a recipient of information.
How do you organize your project team and what operating principles do you use to run it smoothly?
New students typically join our team the summer before their sophomore year to learn our research question and methods. We’ve been fortunate to have a Data+ team most years, so the students engage in this research over the summer and then hit the ground running at the beginning of the fall.
Because we’ve been running for so long and have a close-knit, relatively small team, we often have students who stay with the team for many years. We find a huge benefit to having juniors and seniors who've been with the team for 2-3 years. The experienced students help train new students. One of our recent students even stayed on as a project manager after they graduated from Duke!
For us, graduate student project managers are also crucial. We recruit project managers who are good at statistics and the qualitative analyses we do, but also love working with students. At the beginning of each semester, students split into subteams, set goals and create their own timelines based on their academic schedules, working toward an end-of-semester report to stakeholders. A key guiding principle of our team approach is to always look for the win-win situation: we plan with each student to find a project that advances both our research and their personal goals.
What specific moments stand out as particularly meaningful for student growth or research breakthroughs?
Many examples stand out. For instance, I have seen a student evolve from a quiet first-year to confident senior, delivering an outstanding Graduation with Distinction defense. Students have developed their own projects and brought new connections to our community partnerships. A couple of students have interned with our Justice Services Department partners, bringing “on-the-ground” perspective back to our work. Many students are co-authors on our papers.
Students have also identified critical problems and supported each other through setbacks. In tough times, we’ve seen students develop into true leaders. It has often been a student who helped the team refocus on our core mission and make progress even though things weren’t perfect.
How do you measure or think about success, both in scholarship and broader impact?
For scholarship, it’s easy to count papers published and graduations with distinction. Impact is harder to measure. When we meet with community partners, I often go into the meetings feeling guilty about the slow pace of academic research. But every time we come out of a meeting our community partners have affirmed that they appreciate our work and want more of our insight.
While it’s difficult to claim immediate impact, we are consistently contributing to important conversations. Durham recently enacted cash bail reform, in an effort to stop holding people for minor crimes if they can’t afford to pay for bail. Our findings on the topic, inspired by conversations with the detention facility staff, showed that while it’s good not to hold people just because they’re poor, those with serious mental illness need support systems when released.
Durham has recently purchased a 51-bedroom property that’s being converted to permanent supportive housing to serve the needs of this population. Our team has also built a map of Durham showing the areas of highest arrest and diagnoses of mental health problems. This map informed the coverage area for a new mobile mental health clinic sponsored by Duke.
Our focus group interviews inform the Justice Services Center about programs that work, from the perspective of the clients served in the programs. I also recently published an op-ed based on our Bass Connections work in several North Carolina newspapers.
What are the most important components of sustaining high-quality community partnerships?
Listening and being present are crucial. When first getting to know the Crisis Intervention Team, I attended about 10 meetings in which I just listened and occasionally asked questions. We’ve built sustainable partnerships by having something useful to offer, staying connected, and continuously listening and learning. It’s all about personal relationships with people in Durham who care about the same issues that we do.
What advice would you give to faculty considering leading a Bass Connections team for the first time?
You need to love students and be excited about the project. Be patient as it takes time to come together. Find win-win situations where your goals align with students’ needs for graduation, resume-building or coursework. Don’t be afraid to bring in collaborators for research support in areas where you may not (yet) be an expert. Let students use the work for other purposes that benefit them, and let creative ideas flow!
Learn More
- Read more advice from faculty who have led Bass Connections teams.
- Explore additional opportunities for faculty through Bass Connections.
- Browse faculty FAQs.