Prof. Art Kramer, Director of the Beckman Institute, announces a new intitiative

As our population continues to live and stay in the work force longer, the goal of promoting health and wellness across the lifespan has gained increasing prominence at the national and the campus level. Faculty at the Beckman Institute, distributed across our core initiatives, have made and continue to make critical contributions to this goal. To further enhance those efforts and to give them more organization and visibility, I am proposing a new Beckman initiative, titled HABITS (Health: Attitudes, Biology, Information, Technology, Society). I have asked two of our faculty, Rohit Bhargava and Kara Federmeier, to take on the responsibility of co-initiative leaders. Between them, their complementary scientific expertise ranges from molecular level biology to human cognition, involving a multitude of new science and technology approaches.

The purpose of this new initiative, however, is not a re-organization of the present Beckman Institute structure. We intend this initiative to have a novel structure, which integrates across and complements existing initiatives rather than competing with them. Thus, we hope that many current members of the Institute will choose to associate with this proposed new initiative, while still, as desired, retaining affiliation in their current initiatives. The addition of the HABITS initiative will serve to demonstrate the importance that the Beckman Institute attaches to this area and signal to the campus that the Beckman is a home for conducting interdisciplinary health science and technology research. At the same time, the initiative structure will allow us to better leverage our existing resources, break down remaining barriers, and seek new opportunities. We intend this new initiative to be a catalyst, dynamically bringing together faculty across the Institute and from other campus entities to create cross-cutting intellectual and educational opportunities and innovations.

Given the importance of this area to the campus and future faculty likely to be recruited, we hope that the initiative will provide an additional and attractive option to organize and support health-related endeavors, construed broadly. The initiative leaders will start working extensively with the faculty to identify sub-areas in which Beckman Institute can have an impact and organizing new intellectual activities and support tools. In the short term, we envision seminars, workshops and workgroups, targeting potential areas for further interdisciplinary collaborations and project development. Given that the health area has fundamentally different dynamics in the conduct of projects, ranging from regulatory (Institutional Review Board, for example) to funding agencies, to the training of students, we trust that by collectively associating in this area, we will become better at developing ideas, applying for external support including program project grants, center grants and training grants, conducting our studies, and educating future leaders in the area.