There are many benefits from living in more diverse and integrated neighborhoods, and a recently published study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) provides additional evidence that moving to more integrated neighborhoods has health benefits.

Last month in a report prepared for the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity titled “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century,” Anne Case and Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton provided a more in-depth analysis of their groundbreaking 2015 findings of increasing midlife mortality rates among working-class (high school or less education) Whites in the United States. In the context of continued declines in mortality rates for other age, education, and race/ethnicity groups, these increased mortality rates among midlife, working class Whites are particularly striking and reverse decades of progress i…

Opioid Abuse has rapidly become a public health epidemic. The CDC reports that while the amount of overall pain that patients report has not changed, the amount of prescription opioids sold in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1999.  Deaths from opioid overdose increased 200 percent between 2000 and 2014, and opioids are the leading cause of drug overdose in this country.

When I was named director of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research in August, 2015, we had almost as many unfilled as filled positions in the office. We could have moved quickly to fill these positions, but I remembered the advice of one of my mentors in government leadership, “Hire slowly,” so we had a deliberate and thoughtful process for identifying candidates and making selections over the past 18 months. Before introducing OBSSR’s new staff, I want to thank the “stalwarts”—Bill Elwood, Attallah Hampton, Paula Roberts, Wendy Smith, Mike Spittel, Erica Spotts, and Deborah Yo…

Earlier this month, the fiscal year 2014 recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) were announced. PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

The Inaugural NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Festival was held December 2, 2016. This event was hosted jointly by the NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) and the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR). Thanks to these groups for organizing such a successful event. We had 185 attend in person with another 280 livestreaming the event. If you missed it, an archive of the videocast is available at https://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?Live=21386&bhcp=1 There were dual purposes for this event – 1) to highlight compelling recent…

Today, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) releases its Strategic Plan 2017–2021. 

Last month, the NIH released new policies and related efforts to improve our stewardship, accountability, and transparency of clinical trials. NIH is the largest funder of clinical trials in the United States, and these multi-faceted efforts are designed to address issues at multiple stages of the clinical trials process, from grant application through dissemination of results to the public. Although these policies and efforts were developed primarily with the traditional biomedical clinical trial in mind, they are applicable to social and behavioral trials as well.

Far too many times as a teenager, after displaying a clear lack of judgment, my parents would ask, “What were you thinking?” I suspect that this is a common question of many parents and lies at the heart of an NIH study launching today to understand better how teens’ brains develop into adulthood and how the many social and emotional challenges of adolescence shape this development. The landmark NIH Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States, will follow the biological and behavioral development of…

Graduate training in the behavioral and social sciences remains largely unchanged from the training I received as a graduate student 35 years ago. While the current curricula reflect new knowledge gleaned from decades of research, the overall structure and goals of graduate training in the behavioral and social sciences are essentially the same. More than 60 percent of new science Ph.D.’s will not pursue an academic research career; however, the academia continues to train graduate students primarily for just such careers. According to the most recent National Science Board report on Science a…