I want to start with you telling us like what psychiatric and substance use epidemiology is and particularly how and why you're so interested in looking at how the questions you ask change across someone's life or even across generations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, to start with, you know, most people now know what epidemiology is once we went through the COVID pandemic.

You know, prior to the pandemic, when I told people I was an epidemiologist, most people said, oh, so you study skin.

Oh, wow.

trends and determinants of a wide variety of health outcomes.

What should we know about what we know and what we don't know?

I mean, the central framing of epidemiology as a

science is that we're focused on predicting group averages.

We're identifying risk factors that on average increase or decrease your risk for specific outcomes.

And what that means primarily is that at the individual level, it's often very hard to predict based on the averages of a group who will experience a certain health condition in what way at what time.

So all we can say is.

On average, this group has a higher risk.

And oftentimes, actually, the group averages don't do a very good job of individual level prediction.

Can you explain more what you meant by that?

And I hope that some of these ideas that will emerge will really reach out to make a difference for the average citizen in our community.

I very much appreciated the rich discussion today.

And I think what was really surprising to me was how much consensus emerged when you bring together experts who come from really different disciplinary backgrounds and are providing a really different set of expertise.

There's a lot of disagreement, but then also the consensus that emerges around the importance of community-based research, and the importance of ensuring that our values align with the types of research activities that we engage in.

I learned a lot from the people in the room, especially people who are coming from really different areas of these worlds that intersect from academia to government to funders to community.

And so I felt like It was an activity that we need to be doing more of, you know, these types of really deep and rich conversations that we don't give a lot of space for.

But I do think that this is the only way that we're really going to make progress on advancing the goals of public health that we all believe need to be done so urgently.