ATLANTA—Interdisciplinary research proposals for the third year of Georgia State University’s Next Generation Program, part of the university’s plan to build its prominence in innovative research and scholarship, have been selected, Risa Palm, senior vice president and provost, has announced. The School of Public Health is participating in three of the approved projects.
The Next Generation Program, successor to the highly successful Second Century Initiative (2CI), is aimed at attracting outstanding new faculty members to tackle the challenges of the 21st century, challenges that cannot be solved by one academic area alone.
The research and scholarship areas selected for the third round of the program align with the university’s goals in its 2011 strategic plan. The plan includes the support of a research culture aimed at tackling large and complex problems, a culture that has grown significantly since the beginning of the plan’s implementation and the start of 2CI, bringing top-notch faculty, innovative research and record external research funding.
“The Next Generation Program continues Georgia State’s growth in excellence and prominence of its innovative research and scholarship,” Palm said. “The selected proposals will further strengthen national and international recognition of Georgia State as a leading research university exploring important fields through collaboration across academic disciplines.”
The interdisciplinary areas chosen for the third round of the Next Generation Program include:
Harnessing Modern Biotechnologies and Bioinformatics to Improve Public Health: This cluster will be dedicated to the improvement of health and well-being through innovative applications of big data analysis to further collaborative biomedical research by biologists, public health researchers and computer scientists. The team will include faculty across the departments of Computer Science and Biology, the School of Public Health and the Institute for Biomedical Sciences. The project will apply analytics to public health and therapeutics, promote the development of methods for the control and prevention of epidemics and pandemics, and improve institutional support for commercialization of new therapeutics. Dr. Gerardo Chowell, a mathematical epidemiologist at the School of Public Health, will lend his expertise to the team.
Interpersonal Violence Initiative: This area will bring together policy evaluation, research into biobehavioral causes and outcomes, and research into prevention science methodology. Interpersonal violence has significant negative outcomes for victims, including a wide range of health, behavioral and social problems, along with economic challenges. Researchers will seek to understand the causes and consequences of interpersonal violence, inform public policy and emphasize the development, refinement and evaluation of interventions to reduce or prevent interpersonal violence. The Department of Psychology, the School of Public Health and the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies will collaborate in this initiative. Several faculty members from the School of Public Health will work on the project, including Dr. Dan Whitaker and Dr. Laura Salazar, professors of Health Promotion & Behavior who will serve on the leadership team.
Population Health and Precision Medicine: This program will combine multiple fields of research and scholarship to address how precision medicine, which is the application of modern genomic and data science techniques to tailor health care to individual variation in human disease, can advance the health of the population. There have been legal, ethical and economic concerns raised about precision medicine, but there is no integrated approach in the field. Georgia State’s efforts to develop such an approach will involve the Institute for Biomedical Science, the Department of Biology, the School of Public Health, the College of Law’s Center for Law, Health and Society, and the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Dr. Richard Rothenberg, a physician and Regents’ Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, will lead this team.
Legal Analytics: This area will take the university’s new Legal Analytics Lab, a project of the J. Mack Robinson College of Business and the College of Law and help expand the lab’s innovative research at the junction of law and data science. Advances in data science now allow for the extraction of information from massive amounts of legal documents quickly and efficiently. These tools can also be used to build predictive models to forecast the filing and outcome of litigation, predict judges’ decisions given the facts of a case, identify terms likely to lead to contract disputes and predict patent challenges.
- To read more about the Next Generation Program, visit https://nextgen.gsu.edu.
- To learn more about its predecessor program, the Second Century Initiative, visit https://secondcentury.gsu.edu.
- To learn more about Georgia State’s strategic plan, visit https://strategic.gsu.edu.