E. G. West Centre

Transcription

To understand behavior, you have to understand human beings from the cellular level to the societal level. Biobehavioral Health is a graduate and undergraduate program. It's a department in the College of Health and Human Development at Penn State. It was originally envisioned as this interdisciplinary department where geneticists and molecular biologists would share the same buildings and classes with people who do public health level epidemiology research. Biobehavioral Health just by its very nature addresses issues at the global level in ways that emphasize the local as a part of the global. So we're really truly interdisciplinary. We have people in our department who are geneticists and we have other people like me who are working in communities and trying to translate what my colleagues are learning in the lab to what we are doing out in the field. (background) These are the subject numbers which are located on the tubes. (background) So what really attracted me to Biobehavioral Health was the opportunity to interact across multiple disciplines. The work isn't silo-ed. The work is collaborative. This is what we do. We were all at one point in time in traditional departments. We shouldn't talk as though one is more important than the other. Genes to genomes. We're interested in what's going on in the lab and then what we're doing bedside in a hospital. And I think Penn State fosters collaboration, not only among faculty members, but also among students as well. We encourage students to take classes outside of our department, because we want them to have a breadth of knowledge. (background) When we are talking about equality, we are talking about sameness. (background) (background) When we're talking about equity, we're talking about fairness, (background) (background) and what is considered to be fair. (background) We were one of the first to do this innovative model of this trans-disciplinary within the same department. And our individual faculty have been really productive and prominent within their own sub fields. We all chose to come here to be innovative, to do something different. Willing and excited to engage in cutting age research. Taking risks to improve human health and wellness. To actually have a building that sort of symbolizes this coming together of different disciplines to address behavior is just beyond words. This new building is amazing. It encourages social interactions among faculty, among graduate students, it's a beautiful place to meet and work with one another. Open and direct conversations are very important for developing collaborations and extending interdisciplinary science in new directions where new fields are developed. We are the people that are starting the traditions and have been starting the traditions for 20 years now. That is what is unique about Biobehavioral Health, and that is why we say it's innovative, the program is trans-disciplinary because it cuts across disciplines. And the investigators are multidisciplinary in the traditions they bring to the table. (background) And I'll be working to get you some individual feedback. (background) We train graduate and undergraduate students and we have world class scientists, from around the world, that contribute their research to our growing department.