Episode 31: One Goal, Many Fields: How Prevention Science Connects Us

I'm really struck by not just the interdisciplinarity that both of you have referenced and the adjacent fields that have led you in the directions that have got you to where you are now, but also really interested in the action-oriented field.

dimension of both of your fields, your areas and the field of prevention science overall.

It feels obviously a direct connection to having practical responses to social, biological, psychological ills and societal challenges that are very complex and thus requiring that kind of fusion center response.

And then lastly, my thought was what's really dynamic about the field of prevention science is the places and spaces that it is practiced.

Like how you're mentioning the particularly thinking about clinical settings in your current environment, but also thinking how prevention is practiced in school-based environments.

talking with Pat around various dimensions of the halls of government, whether that is at the highest level to thinking about state agencies or local agencies that are actually being the front lines of delivering programs.

That's just a fascinating dimension to prevention science, which I think is relatively unique because it is trying to bring as many skills and players to bear on really complex challenges.

So are there ways that we can better improve this coordination across disciplines? I find that in my wanderings across academic circles, I have been able to attend the Society for Prevention Research, for example, and also the European Society for Prevention Research annual meetings.

And I find them to be so valuable to understand what is happening in fields just adjacent to our own or thinking about how an analytical lens from one discipline can be incredibly valuable to addressing another challenge.

I wonder if you have any creative ways of trying to open up the aperture for the field, how to break down the silos that specialization in higher education and research tends to do.

Any ideas?

Yeah, I think one thing that our team has started to work on in a few different projects is this recognition that at least in terms of the academic sphere, there's not a ton of incentive or reward for tenure track research or tenure track research.

faculty members or research professors, there's not a ton of incentive or motivation for them to engage in some of these non-traditional research activities, if you will.

In a lot of cases, This sort of public engagement facing work, interacting with policymakers, attending Hill Days where they get to share science with policymakers in their own state capital or in D.C. Those sorts of activities are not typically factored in or recognized during things like tenure track promotions or when a professor goes up for tenure, it's more the typical publish or perish activity.

What's your track record of publishing in high impact journals? What's your funding history look like? Those sorts of things are typically rewarded and kind of baked into the structure of academia.

And I think that what's needed is some structural change that incentivizes broader, not necessarily even prevention scientists, but like people in the HDFS department or people in psychology in broader fields.

There needs to be some sort of change that incentivizes and motivates them to engage in some of this work because as we're all academics, we all, it feels like don't have any time to spare for anything outside of our work.

So I think in order to have a larger change, there needs to be some sort of structural change that will incentivize researchers.

Hayoung, any ideas on how to break out of this traditional framework of incentives and rigidity when we know that the challenges facing us as a species and societies are complex and spill over to different systems?