SDSU psychology faculty members will be well represented at the upcoming meeting for the Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) program titled Revisiting Pasteur’s Quadrant: Use-Inspired Basic Research. Dr. V. Robin Weersing and Dr. Nader Amir have been invited to speak at the meeting, which is scheduled for October 9-10, 2012 at The Madison Hotel in Washington, DC.
There have been numerous concerted attempts to bridge basic and applied disciplines with multiple interdisciplinary initiatives at the NIH. However, major gaps between basic and applied science still exist in the field of behavior change. Perhaps even more concerning is the gap between efficacy and effectiveness research. More often than not, interventions deemed efficacious fail to be effective. The costs of this efficacy-effectiveness gap are enormous for NIH, but more importantly for the public health.
The NIH Common Fund’s SOBC program is convening to explore how use-inspired basic research as a component of intervention research can help to close this gap. Revisiting Pasteur’s Quadrant: Use-Inspired Basic Research will examine how basic science questions about how behavioral interventions work can be asked within applied or clinical research studies on these interventions. The proximal goal of such research is to determine how an intervention exerts its effects, with the ultimate goal of modifying the intervention to become more potent, streamlined, efficient, and implementable. Specifically, this meeting will explore how to conduct basic research—within the context of intervention studies—so that efficacious but difficult-to-implement interventions can be modified eventually to be implementable, community-friendly interventions within the existing health care delivery system. The meeting will feature multiple distinguished scientists presenting their work in this area and will be open to NIH staff, extramural researchers, and other interested parties.