Over the past decade, interdisciplinary research teams have made important advances by integrating social and biological science approaches to address complex problems in medicine and public health. This work has made it abundantly clear that research teams must learn to navigate and integrate across disciplines to successfully conduct pioneering work. Yet, there continues to be significant gaps in conducting interdisciplinary research that reaches across and brings together social and biological approaches. Moreover, efforts at research integration are lagging behind in both the social and biological/health sciences because of the staggering pace at which new social, behavioral, and biological measures are discovered and generated. To keep pace with advances in social and biological sciences, researchers will need to come together and develop novel approaches and methods to integrate across the biological and social sciences. Thus, the goal of the Symposium is to stimulate novel opportunities for biosocial health research by developing a scientific forum that provides an opportunity for emerging scholars to present research and facilitates the integration of social and biological/health approaches for addressing the complex health concerns of today.
The Symposium will be held on Monday, May 13th. The bulk of the Symposium will occur during the morning, with two sessions of paper presentations and a session dedicated to poster presentations. A prominent mid-day speaker will then be featured, after which the annual Demography Daze event (a collaboration between the Carolina Population Center and Duke University Population Research Institute) will be held all afternoon. Lunch for Symposium attendees will be provided.