Overview

The Health & Society Scholars Program at Harvard University is a unique interdisciplinary initiative that integrates activities from four schools, each with a national reputation for academic excellence: The School of Public Health, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Medical School, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Based on a foundation of four core disciplines - social epidemiology, public policy, history of science, and neuroscience - our program brings together some of the world's most renowned academics in those fields.

The two-year program is structured to provide each scholar with the following competencies:
• Knowledge of theories, research and analytical tools that integrate environmental, behavioral and biological conditions to address the determinants of population health.
• Collaborative competence, by which we mean the ability to utilize and apply shared language, methods and techniques to conduct transdisciplinary research. This competence is necessarily grounded in a historical perspective on how scientists and policymakers have conceptualized causation and determinants of health over time.
• Ability to plan effective interventions to improve population health, ranging from public policy approaches to community-based interventions.
• Understanding of life course approaches to population health research.

Mentoring
Scholars who engage in serious interdisciplinary research are often "at risk" in their own disciplines. We have extensive experience in mentoring investigators in population sciences which almost by their very nature fall between departments and disciplines in many settings. Sociologists, economists, and epidemiologists often leave the safe harbor of their field when engaging in the program's activities. At HCPDS we mentor fellows to engage in population research without losing disciplinary expertise in their home fields, by matching them to senior faculty in their "home" disciplines as well as in new ones. It is expected that scholars meet with their mentors on a regular basis.

Resources
RWJ HSS scholars are considered "members" of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies Center, and thus have access to all its resources. The Center's Data and Analysis Core (DA Core) provides programming and statistical support to all members, as well as offers workshops and seminars on a variety of computing and analytic issues. In keeping with the Center's goal of fostering collaboration across a variety of fields, the DA core has a special focus on developing statistical and methodological seminars aimed at making all population researchers aware of cross-disciplinary methodologies.

In tandem with theoretical innovations that incorporate the social context into causal models, RWJ scholars are exposed to analytical techniques that can handle more than one level of analysis. Single-level analyses that relate individual risk factors to individual health outcomes are no longer adequate for testing the influence of multiple social contexts on health. Individuals are embedded within work places, neighborhoods, cultures, and other contexts. Advances in multi-level statistical methodology over the past decade have opened the frontier for such inquiry. Accordingly, the quantitative training of Society and Health scholars features such approaches. Our program also pays attention to the needs of scholars to train in other methodological approaches, including qualitative and ethnographic methods, econometric techniques, and survey analysis. 

The Harvard program is also anchored by a bi-weekly seminar series drawing on faculty from each of the four Harvard schools. On alternating weeks, the co-directors meet collectively with the cohorts to discuss ongoing research progress, career development issues, or other select topics.

RWJ HSS scholars are also encouraged to attend courses, seminars and programs at affiliated Harvard schools and centers. Examples include the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, which holds regular conferences and seminars allowing scholars in the social sciences to gather for research seminars in core methods related to causal inference, innovations in health assessment and general issues relate to demographic and population health issues; The Center for Geographic Analysis offers technical training workshops to introduce GIS concepts and teach the basics on how to use GIS software. In addition, we encourage attednace at The Malcolm Wiener Center Inequality & Social Policy seminar series at the Kennedy School of Government; Department of Sociology Colloquium Series; Harvard Initiative for Global Health seminars and conferences; the Harvard Medical School Neurobiology seminar series; and the RWJF Scholars in Health Policy at Harvard seminar series.

To learn more about the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars program, visit:
http://www.healthandsocietyscholars.org/