On December 5, from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm EST, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) and the NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee will host the annual NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Festival (BSSR) Festival. This event provides a venue for NIH Institutes and Centers to highlight exciting research results, emerging research areas, and innovations in the behavioral and social sciences. We hope you will save the date on your calendar and register here for this virtual event.

This year, we have a really excellent line-up of speakers who will be presenting their research on varied topics across four scientific sessions throughout the day that include but are not limited to presentations on managing patient health information in rural Appalachian communities, cross-linguistic, cross-cultural comparisons of parent-child communication, intersectional stigma and essential shifts needed for HIV/AIDS research, connections between in utero exposure to the Great Depression and late-life epigenetic aging signatures, and the impact of changing global temperatures on youth mental health.

To open the festival, I will be giving remarks on some of my top priorities for OBSSR as well as my broader vision for coordinating BSSR at the NIH, highlighting key activities from the past year and providing a preview of plans for 2024 and beyond.

I encourage you to attend this exciting event that will highlight just a fraction of the outstanding BSSR research that NIH is funding. I hope you can join us for this virtual festival!

by Jane Simoni, Ph.D., Director, Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) and Associate Director for Behavioral ad Social Sciences Research National Institutes of Health (NIH)