Emerging research programs include:
-
Security and Health: Together with partners at Harvard, several other universities, and the HopeLab, this initiative focuses on identifying key drivers of the accelerated rise in youth mental health problems. Absent clarity about the causes of poor mental health in youth (and adults) at a population level, action to ameliorate problems is scattershot and inefficient. Both old and newer lines of research have clearly identified a sense of safety as a basic underlying need that must be satisfied for healthy child development. However, research applying a public health lens, i.e., seeking insight that improves our ability to “promote and protect the health of people and the communities where they live, learn, work and play” may provide important new directions for evaluating a sense of safety and its role in mental health at a population level. This initiative begins to explore sense of safety as a critical social determinant of population health and well-being.
-
Prosociality and Health: Together with partners at Harvard, the University of California, San Francisco Weill Institute for Neurosciences, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Healthy Minds, this initiative studies the relationship of prosocial behaviors and attitudes to health using social epidemiologic and population-based approaches, and ultimately developing ways to apply this knowledge to improve population health.
- Arts and Health: This initiative explores ways to collaborate with a new WHO Collaborating Centre for Arts and Health at University College London and to build on interdisciplinary research in arts, population health, and well-being, with the aim of developing, testing, and disseminating implementation strategies for arts programming that can improve health and well-being.