UNCBHC Proposal

UNC BRAIN AND HUMANITY COLLABORATIVE CATALYST SEMINAR SERIES

Application for a Problem-based format Carolina Seminar Series proposal

Developing A Transdisciplinary Seminar/Curriculum Exploring Biopsychosocial Factors Impacting Adolescent Mental Health And Its Impact On Society: Part of a new initiative: UNC Brain and Humanity Collaborative

According to a 2010 report, 49.5% of U.S. adolescents ages 13-17 meet criteria for mental health disorders, with 14.3% experiencing mood disorders, 31.9% anxiety disorders, 19.6% behavioral disorders, 11.4% substance use disorders. Adolescence is a critical period for mental, social, and emotional wellbeing and development. Despite tremendous advances in scientific methodologies that have generated significant new knowledge about brain function across the life span, our understanding of factors that synergistically contribute to the emergence of neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disabilities in adolescence that impact daily lives and society remain unknown. Traditional discipline-based research and educational approaches adopted at higher-education institutions need to be bridged and integrated to facilitate the development of new understanding and treatment of brain disorders and their impact on society. Such integrative research inevitably needs to adopt a bio-psycho-social approach, integrating novel approaches and developments across biological, psychological, social, engineering and clinical disciplines. It is also imperative to engage the arts and humanities, as arts play a key role in shaping human cognition, emotion and behavior is essential. Successful implementation of this multidisciplinary approach will require interactions amongst researchers across disciplines as well as between academic and commercial partners. Such an integrative bio-psychosocial approach also needs to expand to include the implementation of new seminar series and lectures that bring together scientists across disciplines with policy-makers, to facilitate translation into public outreach.

The goal of this Carolina Seminar Series is to catalyze the formation of the “UNC Brain and Humanity Collaborative”. The proposed collaborative will have multiple components: it will incubate new transdisciplinary research collaborations, foster new transdisciplinary  seminars, as well as catalyze new public outreach. We are planning to work with the NC TraCS Team Science Resource to develop research theme-based activities to foster interdisciplinary collaborations with the ultimate goal being the development and submission of proposals.

The Carolina Seminar provides a unique platform that fosters transdisciplinary intellectual exchanges byengaging faculty, scientists, graduate students and other stake-holders from disparate disciplines together to discuss key findings, literature, methods, and approaches that impact brain maturation. Our “Brain and Humanity Catalyst Seminar Series” will provide an environment that supports strong interdisciplinary interactions between scientists and community leaders: a place where laboratory biologists engage and build collaborations with clinical researchers and physical scientists to understand the medical implications of their basic science and novel avenues for translation of discoveries into novel experimental approaches and potential treatments; where sociologists, epidemiologists and business school faculty and graduate students explore the impact of poverty, economics, and social disparity on brain development and decision making. An environment where neuroscientists and education experts forge new collaborations to understand performance disparities and build new tools to improve self-regulation and enhance cognitive maturation in school age children. Indeed, UNC houses world-leader programs in Neuroscience, developmental disabilities, global public health, public policy, school of government, school of business, School of Law, School of Medicine, Education, Psychology, Sociology, School of Social Work, Allied Health, School of nursing, nutrition, epidemiology, biostatistics, Frank Porter Graham, Music School, Eshelman School of Pharmacy, all of which house outstanding faculty with expertise and research programs highly relevant for understanding, analyzing and disseminating the nature of brain function at an individual level, biological factors that impact them, and the implications of brain development and disorders on education, health outcomes, criminal justice, arts, and broader societal prosperity.

The newly emerging BHC is dynamic and organic, open to new ideas and in continuous interactions with outside researchers, stakeholders and organizations. Our goal is to foster strong interactions between community and scientists, and acts as a hub of knowledge for policy-makers, families, and community leaders working on issues impacting mental health outcomes and their impact on families and society. Our aim is to further engineer a unique intellectual environment for fostering transdisciplinary collaborations and education, enabling graduate students and faculty to get out of their comfort zones and explore new bridging ideas to develop unique pilot projects to address key factors contributing to adolescent mental health issues.

VISION

To build a Brain and Humanity Collaborative enabling an interactive transdisciplinary community of scholars—faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows and staff—to pool their talents to achieve a new level of excellence in understanding adolescent mental health through integrative bio-psycho-social approaches, and to foster new policies and actions to improve societal growth.

MISSION

To advance interdisciplinary research and education that transforms our understanding of brain function, with a focus on adolescence, and translates into innovative solutions for health policy and society.

GOALS of the Brain and Humanity Catalyst Carolina Seminar Series:

Our BHC Catalyst seminar series supports the development of a community of transdisciplinary research groups, including faculty, postdocs, students and staff from across campus and bridging over 3 outstanding triangle Academic Institutions. The new UNC-Brain and Humanity Collaborative Catalyst seminars nurture conversations guided by a common interest in understanding brain function and its interface with key pillars of society, including justice, health, arts, education. The Catalyst seminar series will foster interdisciplinary engagements and conversations by faculty from different departments, and will be open to faculty across the Triangle Academic institutions. The immediate goals are:

  • To support intellectual changes around a broad spectrum of the social and brain sciences.
  • To build an infrastructure for transdisciplinary brain sciences, enabling faculty from different Schools/Departments to connect to address complex bio-psychosocial issues that shape brain function and disorders and human well-being.
  • To foster the engagement of new research networks and collaborations that can be deployed as rapid response teams to new multidisciplinary, multi-site funding initiatives.
  • To provide a gateway for community outreach through courses/seminars.

Based on the Biopsychosocial model of transdisciplinary research, this seminar series will have 3 overarching goals.

  1. The primary goal of this seminar series is to foster cross-campus interdisciplinary conversations about complex key factors that impact adolescent mental health, from pre-puberty until early college years.
  2. Second, these discussions will generate research questions framed by the Biopsychosocial model which will be used to connect faculty across the UNC, Duke, and NC State campuses from a wide range of disciplines to identify integrative approaches that can be implemented in a series of pilot studies to acquire “adolescent mental health” data from local and extended rural communities to reach underserved populations. The intent of the research will be to collect unique data to identify key components of risk factors and predictors of adolescent mental health outcomes, and build new collaborations for the next large “ADMentalHealth” longitudinal study.
  3. Third, the research will identify targets for early detection and identification that can be embedded in field research studies.

In Year 1, the seminar series will meet monthly for nine months of the academic year. The series will be broadly advertised across the campus via the websites of the NCTRACS and UNC Vice Chancellor for Research Offices. It will also be advertised on the list serves of Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. The seminar will be open to faculty, graduate and undergraduate students interested in participating in these model transdisciplinary approaches, to inform about future research study designs and broader collaborations. The seminar series will initially involve information sharing by the seminar ‘conveners’ and other campus leaders (e.g., Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dean of Global Public Health, Vice Dean for research in School of Medicine, Dean of Law School) and discussion on the state of adolescent mental health and mental health care studies Evidence-based discussion on the factors that may contribute to and mitigate against attrition will be included. The series will progress to a more ‘focus group’ informational gathering format with faculty from different disciplines sharing their research expertise, and areas where they are seeking collaborations to advance their core research focus. These discussions will lead to the formation of new transdisciplinary working groups that will include diverse faculty and students across disciplines.

In Year 2, we will prepare a collaborative project to begin designing transdisciplinary studies exploring biological – psychological and social factors that impact adolescent mental health outcomes, including substance abuse, psychotic disorders, mood disorders. In addition to our monthly meeting, we will form working groups to focus on specific problems, where each group will have representations across disciplines to formulate questions and share approaches for understanding convergence of risk factors. These working groups will lead different aspects of the data gathering and analyses. The groups will also provide mentoring opportunities for postdoc and graduate students interesting in developing research and policy work to promote awareness around adolescent mental health issues. These working groups will generate specific research questions that can be implemented in pilot projects.

Pilot projects/grants formulated at the end of Year 2 will explore the following questions and address the following examples of programmatic transdisciplinary themes and topics that will be discussed with expert panels will include exploring (but not limited to):

  • The impact of population crisis on adolescent brain development
  • Key factors that lead to “toxic stress” during development, including social, psychological, economic, genetic, metabolic, environmental, policy, global health, nutrition, other (social media).
  • The bio-psycho-social aspects of gender dysphoria and gender identity crises
  • The neurobiological basis of juvenile crime and justice
  • Educational models for developing adolescents brains
  • The neurobiology of self-regulation through childhood and adulthood for a peaceful society
  • The neurobiology of reward and Adolescents as an economic market
  • Environmental risk factors for adolescent mental health
  • Impact of substance abuse on brain development (in particular opioids)
  • Neural, social, environmental correlates of eating disorders in adolescents
  • Adolescent brain injury and lifetime mental health outcomes
  • Therapeutic implementation:
    • Arts and Brain development: implications for building nurturing and healing environments
    • Non-pharma implementation (e.g. mindfulness-based interventions)

In Year 3 the working groups will prepare grant applications (to both internal and external targets including NCTraCs seed grants) and develop publications targeted to high-impact sources, both journals, but also white papers and policy papers that may impact policy change.

HOW TO SUSTAIN AND LAUNCH the UNC Brain and Humanity Collaborative?

The BHC will seek funding for seed grants to support the development of educational and collaboration building programs such as journal clubs, guest speaker series, workshops, and larger-scale meetings. In close collaboration with Innovate Carolina and funding opportunities, and working closely with the National Prevention Science Coalition partners (NPSC – Taylor Scott) the Collaborative will identify funding from target foundation(s), to continue supporting transdisciplinary seminars, plenary lectures, open-to-the-public educational lectures, catalyst meetings, and incubator grants that will open the University to the community and foster new collaborations.

Audiences (These seminars would be of interested to: researchers, clinicians, and advocates of adolescent mental health issues and challenges)

Faculty
Post Docs, Graduate Students and other Trainees
Staff
Community stakeholders who have adolescent mental health as part of their professional responsibility (e.g., school guidance counselors, clinicians, and clergy)

Location: TBD

Timing: 12-1:30pm

Conveners, include school and/or department or organization affiliation:

Karen Demby
Linda Beeber
Stephen Hooper
Meghan Shanahan
Cynthia Bulik
Karen Poulos
Erin Malloy
Alice Ammerman
William Copeland
Jane Costello
Ronni Zuckerman

Participants:

Taylor Scott, Ph.D., Research-to-Policy Coordinator –  National Prevention Science Coalition (NPSC)
Dianne Fishbein – Penn State
Ty Ridenour – RTI
Bobashev – RTI
Tamera Coyne-Beasley – UNC Chapel Hill
Julie Daniels – UNC Chapel Hill
Allison Aiello – UNC Chapel Hill
Bradley Gaynes – UNC Chapel Hill
Amy Ursano – UNC Chapel Hill
Jennifer Richards – UNC Chapel Hill
Cindy Bulik – UNC Chapel Hill

External Advisory Experts:

Raquel Gur
Jean Frazier
BJ Casey
Bea Luna