On June 14 and 15, 2023, OBSSR and collaborating NIH ICOs will host a virtual workshop, Advancing the science of aggression across species and disciplines. The workshop will be available for live public viewing on the NIH Videocast. Goals of the workshop include bringing together both animal and human aggression researchers from various backgrounds to facilitate dialogue across disciplines, individual and interpersonal levels of analysis, lifespan, and disorders/diseases; identifying barriers and potential solutions to move research on basic mechanisms of aggression and health to inform intervention development as well as identify opportunities for more use-inspired basic research; and identifying research gaps and opportunities in the science of aggression and health in the service of advancing progress in prevention, assessment, and treatment.

Registration is not required. This virtual workshop will be live streamed through NIH Videocast. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions through the live videocast.

On June 14 and 15, 2023, OBSSR and collaborating NIH ICOs will host a virtual workshop, Advancing the science of aggression across species and disciplines. The workshop will be available for live public viewing on the NIH Videocast. Goals of the workshop include bringing together both animal and human aggression researchers from various backgrounds to facilitate dialogue across disciplines, individual and interpersonal levels of analysis, lifespan, and disorders/diseases; identifying barriers and potential solutions to move research on basic mechanisms of aggression and health to inform intervention development as well as identify opportunities for more use-inspired basic research; and identifying research gaps and opportunities in the science of aggression and health in the service of advancing progress in prevention, assessment, and treatment.

Registration is not required. This virtual workshop will be live streamed through NIH Videocast. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions through the live videocast.

Location: https://nih.zoomgov.com/j/1612552260?pwd=WkwvQkZaengxVUFOL3A5dTVHWHBDdz09

The NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) was established to enhance information exchange, communication, integration, and coordination of behavioral and social sciences research/training activities at the NIH. The BSSR-CC alternates between closed and open meetings each month. In Open BSSR-CC sessions, the public, including representatives of professional organizations, are welcome to attend, and the content of meetings is restricted to those topics appropriate for public awareness or discussion.

Presentation topic: Social Influence, Policy, Economics, and Communications

Neil Lewis, Jr., Ph.D., is a behavioral scientist who studies how social interventions and policies can motivate behavioral changes to promote equitable outcomes in society. Lewis’s research examines how people’s social contexts and identities influence how they make sense of the world around them, and the implications of those meaning-making processes for their motivation to pursue a variety of goals in life. He is interested in the consequences of these processes not only for individuals, but also for the communities and societies those individuals are embedded in; he is particularly interested in using insights from research findings to improve educational, health, and environmental outcomes for individuals and societies. Lewis’s work has been recognized by numerous awards and honors, including: the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, the SAGE Young Scholar Early Career Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and Cornell’s Research and Extension Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Science and Public Policy. Lewis received his B.A. in economics and psychology from Cornell University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan.

Location: https://nih.zoomgov.com/j/1616288038?pwd=NjNscVU3UGZTUStxZ2FZb2F4YlplUT09

The NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) was established to enhance information exchange, communication, integration, and coordination of behavioral and social sciences research/training activities at the NIH. The BSSR-CC alternates between closed and open meetings each month. In Open BSSR-CC sessions, the public, including representatives of professional organizations, are welcome to attend, and the content of meetings is restricted to those topics appropriate for public awareness or discussion.

Presentation topic: Social Connection

Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Social Connection & Health Lab at Brigham Young University. She is also the founding scientific chair and board member for the U.S. Foundation for Social Connection and the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection. Dr. Holt-Lunstad is an international scientific expert whose research focuses on the individual and population health effects, biological mechanisms, and effective strategies to mitigate risk and promote protection associated with social connection. Her research has been seminal in the recognition of social isolation and loneliness as risk factors for early mortality. As the lead scientific editor for a US Surgeon General’s Advisory and Framework for a National Strategy, her work also focuses on translating evidence into practice and policy. She serves as a scientific advisor and regularly consults for organizations across sectors aimed at addressing this issue. She has provided expert testimony in a US Congressional Hearing, served as a member of multiple National Academy of Sciences consensus committees, the UK Cross Departmental Loneliness Team, European Joint Research Council, World Health Organization, and a subject matter expert for the Gravity Project, Commit to Connect the national clearinghouse of interventions and the CDC. Her work has been widely recognized within her discipline, including several awards, and is regularly highlighted in major media outlets.

Presentation topic: Social and Computational Science

Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data. Dr. Gebru also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility, and health of Black people in the field of AI. She is also on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian highschool students, free of charge.

Presentation topic: Health, Lifespans, and Fitness are all Affected by Social and Environmental Stressors

An evolutionary anthropologist and geneticist, Dr. Tung is an Associate Professor of Biology and a researcher at Duke University. In 2019, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Tung’s research is helping to provide a better understanding for how health, lifespans, and fitness are all affected by social and environmental stressors. Tung focused her early research on primates but is now looking to further her research with meerkats to continue to study the social interactions among them and link those interactions to other aspects of research. Tung discovered that the social environment of primates doesn't just influence the physical health and behavior of an individual, but also affects gene regulation. In a different study, she researched the same idea, but in more competitive environments such as wild meerkats. She also looked into how the different social environments affected the rest of the individual's life in terms of social status, relationships with others, and behavior. She has conducted and contributed to many other projects. Jenny Tung's most cited paper according to Google Scholar is "Social environment is associated with gene regulatory variation in the rhesus macaque immune system". Published in 2012, the paper has been cited by fields ranging from human genomics to bioethics.