Events

Public Health's Constitutional Crisis: What You Need to Know A TALK WTH PROFESSOR STEPHEN VLADECK (Georgetown Law, CNN) History Matters: An Endowed Lecture Series  Sponsored by the Department of Sociomedical Sciences  and the Center for History and Ethics of Public Health Grant cancellations, funding freezes, layoffs at major health agencies, and declarations that the President has the right to impound Congressional-appropriated money.  In this talk, constitutional law authority Stephen Vladeck, JD, will walk our community through the major legal issues we are confronting and must understand.  Vladeck is also Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Federal Courts at Georgetown Law and the author of the popular One First blog and a regular commentator on CNN who most recently appeared on 60 Minutes.   

Join us on April 8 at 12pm ET for the next Ethics Grand Rounds with Lucas J. Matthews, PhD and Paul Appelbaum, MD.  We will be discussing The Geneticization of Education and Its Bioethical Implications, in person and online.  For under $10, direct-to-consumer genetic tests provide reports on educational traits like intelligence and math ability, placing them on a genomic spectrum. This technology, while publicly accessible and cost-effective, has prompted growing concern about its societal impacts and the potential geneticization of education, where educational abilities are increasingly perceived as merely genetic. In this session, Division of Ethics Assistant Professor Lucas Matthews, PhD, and Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry Director Paul Appelbaum, MD, will explore the bioethical implications of this new technology, and discuss the future of equity in education.

Understanding the complexity of m6A mRNA regulation Sara Zaccara, PhD Assistant Professor, Department of Systems Biology Columbia University Irving Medical Center Hosted by Dr. V. Alessandro Gennarino

SPRING 2025 SEMINARS OF THE ROBERT N. BUTLER COLUMBIA AGING CENTER | Assets of Aging: A Series on the Capabilities that Accrue with Longer Lives Join us for the Columbia Aging Center's ONLINE seminar--the next in a series that focuses on the assets of aging and the capabilities that accrue with longer lives. Please register to attend via Zoom on April 9, 2025. Details and registration link below.   WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2025, 12:00PM-1:00PM ET Structural social capital and healthy aging Ichiro Kawachi, MBChB, PhD John L. Loeb & Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Social Epidemiology  Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Virtual Seminar Location: Zoom Register to attend via Zoom at: https://columbiacuimc.zoom.us/meeting/register/J7AyNHdaRQCVtxNRHnDw5w   Abstract: Social connections promote the process of healthy aging through the exchange of tangible support and by encouraging people to remain active as they age via informal socializing, volunteering and participation in organizations. Collectively, we refer to the resources derived from social connections as “social capital”.   Social capital is linked to the prevention of functional disability as well as cognitive decline. In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General called for the development of a national strategy to advance social connection. My talk focuses on two questions prompted by the Surgeon General’s call: (1) how can interventions enhance structural social capital to promote healthy aging? and (2) how do we ensure equity in access to social capital? With regard to strengthening social capital, I distinguish between two types of intervention strategies. In the first type, the manipulation consists of activities that directly build or strengthen social capital. An example is community service programs, such as the Experience Corps. Other interventions in this category include CBPR projects involving community health workers, the provision of social spaces (community centers, Men’s Shed, community gardens), social prescribing and related interventions that mobilize the health workforce to connect individuals to community resources. In the second category of interventions, social capital acts as an intervening factor to channel the effects of an intervention to improve outcomes. That is, the strengthening of social capital is not the target of the intervention per se, but it is a by-product or collateral benefit. Examples of these types of interventions include place-based interventions (participatory neighborhood development planning), neighborhood regeneration, and social infrastructure interventions in the built environment (e.g., parks, playgrounds, libraries). Policies also need to address existing inequities in access to social capital by socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, racially minoritized groups and people living with disabilities.