2020 Annual Meeting Webinar Series

Description: What does behavioral medicine of the future look like? What kind of research will we be doing? SBM President Michael Diefenbach, PhD, will present the results of the Provocative Questions in Behavioral Medicine initiative. This crowdsourced multi-stage effort involved the full SBM membership and will provide a glimpse into the future of behavioral medicine. Attendees will be informed about the methodology and results of the provocative questions initiative. Attendees will learn about future directions of behavioral medicine and efforts we might undertake to meet future challenges.

Dr. Diefenbach is a professor in the Departments of Medicine, Urology, and Psychiatry at Northwell Health and the School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in New York. He is director of behavioral research in the Departments of Medicine and Urology, and academic director of the Faculty Research Career Development Program. He is a founding member of the Center of Health Innovation and Outcomes Research, and co-directs the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Monter Cancer Center. He has more than 20 years of federally funded research in behavioral medicine in the areas of treatment decision making, quality of life, and cancer prevention and control.  He has published more than 80 peer reviewed articles and edited the Handbook of Medical Decision Sciences.

A little about her talk: From precision medicine to predictive algorithms, science and technology seek to address a variety of human problems by producing data and tools to help us understand our world and ourselves. But without careful consideration of the social dimensions of innovation, we risk reinforcing longstanding forms of inequality and injustice, and even producing new forms of discrimination that are hidden behind a veneer of technological neutrality. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin, PhD, will examine a range of contemporary issues at the nexus of data and democracy—from DNA databases to targeted advertising—so we can think together about the social values embedded in these platforms and systems. Her aim is to expand our collective imagination around what counts as relevant and meaningful to scholarly and public debates, so a greater array of people can shape the world we inhabit.

Dr. Benjamin is a sociologist who has studied the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine for the past 15 years. She has published three books and numerous articles on the topic. She is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine, race and citizenship, knowledge and power. She is also the founder of the JUST DATA Lab and a faculty associate in the Center for Information Technology Policy, Program on History of Science, Center for Health and Wellbeing, Program on Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Department of Sociology. She serves on the executive committees for the Program in Global Health and Health Policy and Center for Digital Humanities. Dr. Benjamin is the author of three books; People’s Science, Captivating Technology, and Race After Technology.

Kara Hall, PhD, will Help Us Forge Forward Together

When: Tuesday, June 9, 12 pm ET

Session title: Forging Forward Together: Transforming Scientific Practice to Accelerate Scientific Progress

Presidential Symposium: From Ideas to Interventions: A Review of Frameworks for Designing and Optimizing Health-Related Behavioral Interventions

When: Friday, June 12, 12 pm ET

Presenters: Susan M. Czajkowski, PhD; Kate Guastaferro, PhD; Tianchen Qian, PhD; Susan Murphy, PhD; and Bonnie Spring, PhD

Description: Behavioral risk factors (e.g., tobacco use, adverse diet, sedentary lifestyles, overweight and obesity) are major contributors to chronic diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Designing more effective interventions for these risk factors is critical to accelerating the impact of behavioral medicine on disease incidence, progression and recovery. While there exist a number of frameworks and process models aimed at promoting the careful, systematic design and optimization of behavioral interventions, little guidance is available to compare key aspects of these models, understand their common and unique features, and aid in selecting the best approach for a specific research question. In this symposium, several approaches to designing and optimizing interventions for behavioral risk factors will be reviewed to promote greater knowledge of each individual framework, advance our understanding of commonalities and synergies between the frameworks, and allow for an informed choice on the part of investigators interested in developing and testing health-related behavioral interventions. The panel will include three speakers. The first speaker will discuss the Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) experimental medicine approach and the Obesity-Related Behavioral Intervention Trials (ORBIT) model for developing treatments for chronic diseases. The second speaker will then describe the Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST), and the third speaker will discuss an experimental design for informing the design of just-in-time adaptive interventions: Micro-Randomized Trials (MRTs). Finally, the discussant will identify commonalities and synergies among these frameworks as well as key differences that can help researchers choose which approach most benefits their research goals.

Innovators will Explore Artificial Intelligence

When: Tuesday, June 16, 12 pm ET

Session title: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Hope, Hype, or Harm?

A little about this talk: In 2015, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and dozens of the world’s top visionaries in artificial intelligence (AI) signed an open letter declaring “a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase.” Precisely because these capabilities are now expanding beyond the hypothetical, though, the letter went on to say “it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.” The potential for both good and harm from these disruptive technologies is enormous. Understanding the future of these systems requires urgent, cross-disciplinary conversation. This panel will bring together three pioneering voices across the fields of computational science, behavioral medicine, and healthcare to identify the provocative questions that are urgently needed to guide the evolution of “intelligent systems” in medicine.

How do We Know what Works? Emulating Randomized Trials when Trials are Not Available

When: Friday, June 19, 12 pm ET

Presenter: Miguel Hernan, PhD

When randomized experiments are not feasible or available, causal effects are often estimated from non-experimental or observational databases. Therefore, causal inference from observational databases can be viewed as an attempt to emulate a hypothetical randomized experiment—the target experiment or target trial—that would quantify the causal effect of interest. This talk outlines an approach to observational causal inference that makes the target trial explicit.

Riding the Wave of Digital Transformation in Science

When: Tuesday, June 23, 12 pm ET.

Presenter: Brad Hesse, PhD

Our rapidly changing digital ecosystem changes both the questions and answers we pursue in behavioral medicine. Attend this master lecture to follow the trail of digital connectivity in science from its early roots in the national “co-laboratories” of the human genome, to the “artificial intelligence winter” in medicine, to a supernova of accelerations (both good and bad) enabled by cloud computing, big data, machine learning, ubiquitous social media, the “Internet of Things," and computer-assisted precision medicine.

In Pursuit of Principles that are Practical: How Integrating Mechanisms and Context will Advance the Study of Health Behavior Change

When: Friday, June 26, 12 pm ET

Presenter: Alexander Rothman, PhD