The second edition Research Exchange at the Colorado School of Public Health began on October 6 with a focus on numbers: dollars, percentages, number of poster presentations and research grant amounts. However, throughout the day, lively discussions focused on how statistics translate into researchers’ efforts to solve the public health problems that define human life.
As more than 200 attendees settled into their seats in the Anschutz Health Sciences building, the ColoradoSPH Dean Cathy Bradley, PhD, presented a series of impressive figures. After reflecting on the fact that ColoradoSPH is still “pretty young in academic terms,” Bradley added that “our accomplishments are mature well beyond our years.” To illustrate, Bradley announced that the school raised more than $44 million in externally funded research in 2022, placing it for the second consecutive year among the top 20 public health schools funded by the National Institutes of Health . The 17% increase in funding over the previous year was met with loud applause.
The event also included 21 poster presentations of research conducted by ColoradoSPH students and colleagues in areas including gun violence, artificial intelligence, food waste, bone health, hypertension in the Black community And much more. The top four posters each won a $500 prize, Bradley noted.
During breaks, the posters were available for viewing. Large crowds of attendees peppered the researchers with questions, emphasizing what Bradley had in mind when she encouraged her audience to “learn more about colleagues and exchange ideas” and to “be open and curious.”
Rich research resources
Many ideas flowed after Bradley’s brief introduction, starting with the keynote address from Barbara Rimer, DrPH, MPH, former professor emerita of health behavior and dean emeritus of the Gillings School of Global Public Health at University of North Carolina. The morning and afternoon roundtables explored the work of 28 researchers from ColoradoSPH and other sites on major public health issues. Topics included technological transformation in public health; teaching public health in a time of change; combat misinformation in the field of public health; conduct participatory research on climate change; improve the delivery of mental health services to low-resource populations; and recognize and address structural racism in public health research.
After lunch, plenary speakers from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, President and CEO George Sparks and Kristen Uhlenbrock – founder and director of the museum, respectively Institute for Science and Policy – engaged the audience in a free-wheeling discussion focused on using “civil dialogue” to include science as an important part of policy discussions and decisions.
Learn to listen
In her wide-ranging presentation, Rimer emphasized the importance of communicating research and public health goals with policymakers and everyday people. She said she gained this knowledge through many years of research into how to encourage behaviors to reduce cancer risk and as the first woman and behavioral scientist to lead the National Advisory Council on Cancer. cancer from the National Cancer Institute.
“One of the lessons I learned working with the National Cancer Institute and talking with legislators was to think about how our work, whether it’s cancer prevention or other areas of public health, is making a difference at the state and local level,” Rimer said. . “When I think of schools of public health, I think of the obligation and responsibility we have to understand local conditions. She also stressed the importance of public health professionals “always being humble and realizing that we don’t always have the answers.”
Rimer then urged the audience to identify problems and focus their research on issues “that can really make a difference in people’s lives”, including climate change, food and nutrition, social inequality, health mental health, illness and health of underserved populations. . She outlined the ways in which the Gillings School encourages innovation and entrepreneurship as ways to find solutions to these key issues, in partnership with local communities.
Panelists discuss mental health
In two of the panel presentations, panelists also focused on the importance of developing public health research around listening and responding to community voices. For example, in her discussion of improving mental health services for underserved populations, Megan Cherewick, PhD, assistant professor of community and behavioral health and in the ColoradoSPH Center for Global Health, described her work on the “global mental health crisis” among young children and adolescents in Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine and Darjeeling, India. Cherewick said she bases her research and work on finding and developing the strengths of those she seeks to serve.
“We always start with the community and hear what they think are the biggest priorities,” Cherewick said. For example, in Darjeeling, some of its work has focused on “task-shifting” mental health interventions to community members and peers to make up for the lack of specialists. An important area is to provide neurodiversity training – the idea that the human brain exhibits individual and expected variations – to support and strengthen young people with autism.
“It’s really wonderful to have community members who are so willing to meet the mental health needs of a very diverse population,” Cherewick said.
A dive into disinformation
In a panel discussion focused on combatting misinformation in public health, Patricia Valverde, PhD, MPH, assistant professor in ColoradoSPH’s Department of Community and Behavioral Health and director of the Center for Public Health Practice’s Patient navigation and community health worker training program, sounded a similar theme. Valverde described training community health workers and patient navigators in Spanish and English to address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy through motivational interviewing techniques.
The idea was not to challenge or overturn myths and false beliefs that people had absorbed about the vaccine from unreliable sources, Valverde said. Rather, workers and navigators were trained to listen, investigate, and understand skeptical questions without judgment.
“Community health workers and navigators are representatives of the communities they serve,” she said. “They are culturally and linguistically aligned, and trust has been built. » Aside from that, Valverde added, health departments and clinics have often struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic to overcome suspicion of vaccines.
One of the key lessons of the training, Valverde said, is not to “overestimate the science.” We had to be transparent and clear about what we know and what we don’t know. The idea was to collapse
community resistance (to the vaccine) based on everything they had heard and instead open lines of communication.
Keep it neutral
The post-lunch session with plenary speakers Sparks and Uhlenbrock also solidified the theme that communicating about science and research requires listening and remaining open to disagreement. DMNS’s Institute for Science and Policy was launched in 2018 as a “nonpartisan, politically neutral” source for tackling major challenges, such as climate change, with “scientific thinking, empathy and ‘inclusivity’. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Institute has partnered with ColoradoSPH to create an online seminar series which featured science and policy experts and allowed the audience to learn and ask any questions they had.
Sparks and Uhlenbrock emphasized the need to listen to the community about its concerns, respond rationally and establish lines of communication.
“Most of our work is relational,” Sparks said. “Science is part of the process of making more informed decisions. We are not providers of answers or solutions.
Written by Tyler Smith for the Colorado School of Public Health.
