Predictive Health Education

The Predictive Health and Society educational program includes new opportunities for basic and translational research. This program is based on the belief that the transformation of biomedicine will be made possible by rapid scientific and technical advances. The scientific focus of the initiative will include: defining health as a positive state, integrating biology, behavior, and environment in the definition; discovering/inventing new ways to measure and predict health that utilize cutting edge science and technology; identifying processes that can be influenced by interventions intended to maintain the healthy state; thinking about how health is considered and expressed in society; and developing strategies and tactics for translating this new knowledge to individuals and populations. The Predictive Health and Society initiative will require new expertise in the health sciences.

A focus of study and practice on human health as opposed to disease is a major change in paradigm for both health care and biomedical research. This fact creates the necessity to educate a different kind of biomedical investigator as well as the opportunity to do so. These individuals will be conversant in the multiple disciplines essential to realizing the necessary change, will conduct laboratory and population based research with a health focus, and will form the cadre of leaders who will shape the direction of health related research and service in the future.

Predictive Health is proposing new multidisciplinary education pathways that will prepare biomedical scientists to conduct and lead health-focused research. These pathways will be designed to create a comprehensive educational experience that will produce multi-disciplinary professionals trained to understand healthy human function with an expertise in the sciences of nutrition, exercise, behavioral motivation and interpersonal interactions.