The festival highlights exciting research results, emerging areas, and innovations in health related BSSR. This NIH-wide event enables efficient leveraging of NIH resources and expertise. The BSSR-CC members contribute diverse and comprehensive perspectives on the NIH BSSR portfolio, thus facilitating the selection of an outstanding array of research results that are highlighted at the festival.

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The Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) open meetings include representatives from NIH Institutes, Centers and Offices and interested members of the public to meet to discuss behavioral and social sciences-relevant topics.

In the era of transformation to value-based care, new accountability is placed on health care delivery systems to provide high quality care that improves the health of populations, improves the patient experience of care, and concurrently reduce costs. Many priority conditions for value-based care have associated lifestyle, behavioral, and/or mental health components that contribute to disease outcomes and costs. To address these factors, there is a growing demand for BSSR interventions that are reliable, effective in achieving desired prevention and management outcomes, acceptable to patients, and flexible for integration directly into health care and population health practice. Despite the volume of effective interventions resulting from BSSR funding, adoption of these interventions into care delivery remains rare.

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Distinguished Lecturer: Mark J. VanLandingham, Ph.D.
Presentation: Culture and Resilience: Insights from the Vietnamese American community in post-Katrina New Orleans

The 12th NIH Matilda White Riley Behavioral and Social Sciences Honors was held on Thursday, June 6, 2019 on the NIH Campus, Wilson Hall (Bldg. 1). Mark J. VanLandingham, Ph.D., Thomas C. Keller Professor, Tulane University, is the 2019 NIH Matilda White Riley Distinguished Lecturer. His research focuses on a wide array of topics related to demography, sociology, and public health. He has led recent major projects focusing on the antecedents and consequences of largescale rural-to-urban migration within Southeast Asia; and acculturation, health, and well-being among Vietnamese immigrants in the United States.

This presentation provided an overview of the Eureka Research Platform, an NIH-funded resource for conducting research using mobile technology. Dr. Olgin described the resource (including its capabilities), provide a description of ongoing studies using the platform, and share lessons learned and the mechanisms by which the resource can be used for NIH-funded studies.

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The microbiome is now considered our "second genome," with potentially comparable importance to the genome in determining human health. There is, however, a relatively limited understanding of the broader environmental factors, particularly social conditions, that shape variation in human microbial communities. Fulfilling the promise of microbiome research—particularly the microbiome’s potential for modification—will require collaboration between biologists and social and population scientists. For life scientists, the plasticity and adaptiveness of the microbiome calls for an agenda to understand the sensitivity of the microbiome to broader social environments already known to be powerful predictors of morbidity and mortality. For social and population scientists, attention to the microbiome may help elucidate nagging questions as to the underlying biological mechanisms that link social conditions to health. Dr. Herd outlined key substantive and methodological advances that can be made if collaborations between social and population health scientists and life scientists are strategically pursued, as well as provide a recent example of just such a collaboration.

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