Social Science-Environmental Health Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Brown, Phil

Abstract

This two-day conference in May or June 2015 will bring together 60-100 scholars, government agency professionals, and community-based organizations working at the intersection of the social and environmental health sciences, in order to review progress to date, develop """"""""best practices"""""""" for future research, and broadly disseminate materials to support future training in this transdisciplinary arena. The conference will achieve three specific aims: 1) Conduct a conference to examine the contributions of research and practice at the intersection of social science and environmental health;2) Develop """"""""best practices"""""""" for future research and practice;3) Disseminate findings and create ongoing web portal for information exchange and data archiving. Social scientists have long played a role in studying the impacts of environmental health threats, including ethnographic studies of communities contaminated by hazardous waste or harmed by oil spills or chemical releases. In recent years, social scientists have collaborated with environmental health scientists on biomonitoring and household exposure monitoring, and have played important roles on NIEHS Environmental Justice and Community-based Participatory Research grants and in NIEHS centers. Environmental health scientists are increasingly turning to social science approaches to round out their community-oriented research and practice. Hence, it is time to solidify social science/environmental health collaborations with such a conference. Through extensive pre-conference planning and post-conference follow-up, this conference will provide guidance to scholars seeking to work at the social science-environmental health interface, as well as government agencies and foundations who wish to fund ways to utilize such research approaches. In terms of relevance to NIEHS'Strategic Plan, this conference meshes well with Theme 3: Translational Science, Theme 5: Training and Education, Cross-cutting theme: Collaborative and Integrative Approaches, Goal 8: Enhance the teaching of EHS at all levels of education and training, Goal 9: Inspire a diverse and well-trained cadre of scientists to move our transformative environmental health science forward, and train the next generation of EHS leaders from a wider range of scientific disciplines and diverse backgrounds, and Goal 11: Promote bidirectional communication and collaboration between researchers and stakeholders, e.g., policy-makers, clinicians, intervention and prevention practitioners, and the public, in orde to advance research translation in the environmental health science. The conference will be organized by the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute at Northeastern University, in collaboration with long-time (10 years) partner, Silent Spring Institute. The collaborators have pioneered in transdisciplinary research and training. We will encourage participation by NIEHS staff, other NIH Institutes and Centers, and relevant NSF and EPA programs.

Public Health Relevance

This two-day conference will bring together 60-100 scholars, government agency professionals, and community-based organizations working at the intersection of the social and environmental health sciences, in order to review progress to date, develop best practices for future research, and broadly disseminate materials to support future training in this transdisciplinary arena. Social scientists have long played a role in studying the impacts of environmental health threats, including ethnographic studies of communities contaminated by hazardous waste or harmed by oil spills or chemical releases. Recent growth in social science-environmental health science collaboration makes it imperative to train a new generation of transdisciplinary researchers.