The University at Albany has taken a significant step toward addressing the interconnected issues that impact health and wellness with the formation of a new College of Integrated Health Sciences. This episode of The Engagement Ring features an interview with the dean and senior vice dean of the college. Dr. Erin Bell and Dr. Vicky Rizzo explain why combining and building on UAlbany’s existing expertise in public health and social welfare, and growing nursing program will better prepare -- and position -- students, faculty and researchers for interdisciplinary studies that benefit the public.
The University at Albany's College of Integrated Sciences
Dr. Erin Bell, Dean, College of Integrated Health Sciences
Dr. Victoria Rizzo, Vice Dean, College of Integrated Health Sciences
Articles from the UAlbany News Center:
UAlbany Announces the New College of Integrated Health Sciences
Erin Bell Named Dean of New College Joining the Schools of Public Health, Social Welfare
The Engagement Ring, Episode 28: Breaking Down Barriers to Better Health and Well-being
[Lively, upbeat theme music plays as program host Mary Hunt introduces the program and plays excerpts from the program.]
ANNOUNCER /MARY HUNT:z
Welcome to the engagement ring. Your connection to an ever-widening network of higher education professionals, scholars and community partners working to make the world a better place. I'm Mary Hunt. Today on the podcast…
VICKY RIZZO:
In these times, people cannot work in a silo. They have to work together and public health and social welfare and nursing really have such common values that there is a way that we can come together to solve really big societal problems that individual disciplines can't solve.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
The University at Albany has taken a significant step toward addressing the interconnected issues that impact health and wellness with the formation of a new College of Integrated Health Sciences.
ERIN BELL:
We're trying to find solutions that work for people and work for communities, and you can't do that unless you work with one another and partner.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
I’ll talk with the college’s senior vice dean Vicky Rizzo and dean Erin Bell about why combining and building on UAlbany’s existing expertise in public health and social welfare, and growing nursing program will better prepare -- and position -- students, faculty and researchers for interdisciplinary studies that benefit the public.
VICKY RIZZO:
Neither one of us knows how to work any other way like this is the way you bring about change to make communities healthier.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Here’s my conversation with Erin Bell and Vicky Rizzo of the College of Integrated Health Sciences.
MARY HUNT:
Welcome to the podcast. Erin and Vicky.
[Music fades]
ERIN BELL:
Thank you.
VICKY RIZZO:
Thank you.
MARY HUNT:
Congratulations on the marriage of your two schools of public health and social welfare. You ladies make a really fierce team. Do you know that?
[Laughter]
MARY HUNT:
You have done this integration in a very short time, it seems, and you've done it seamlessly. What has the project been like?
ERIN BELL:
We’ve been very fortunate to work with a really strong team of faculty, students and staff from both the School of Social Welfare, the former school of public health and certainly our new nursing program. And together with lots and lots of work groups and meetings and working together, we've really built this as a collaborative, integrated approach, which is where we need to move into for our disciplines in order to meet our mission, which is to help health and well-being for everyone in our community. So it's really been a positive experience. We still have a ways to go with some of our things, like bylaws and other types of infrastructure type of updates and changes, but we're doing it collaboratively and with a lot of input from all of our internal and external partners with our schools.
MARY HUNT:
Why did the university see need to bring the two schools together?
VICKY RIZZO:
So when I became the acting dean and of the School of Social Welfare in 2021, the provost said to me and the interim dean of the School of Social of Public Health at the time Mary Gallant, could we explore the integration of our two schools. And we were definitely open to that. And we did a year's worth of exploration where they're mainly looking at are there any barriers to us coming together. We hired a consultant, we had focus groups, and we concluded at the end of that year that really there were no significant barriers to us coming together as a college with nursing and social work and public health and but there were certain things that we would need in order to make that happen. And, you know, in our final report, Mary and I were like, this really can happen, and it can happen for the greater good. It would raise the visibility of all the programs in the college and we just also know that in these times people cannot work in a silo. They have to work together, and public health and social welfare and nursing really have such common values that there is a way that we can come together to solve really big societal problems that individual disciplines can't solve. I spent my whole career in public health and social welfare as a clinician and as a scientist, and I have never seen any of the things that I work on as being siloed. They include all of these professions, and we are much more powerful together. And so, I think that the provost and the president, and then, you know, once we did our exploratory study, Erin and I worked really closely with faculty last year, we see the positive strength of bringing these disciplines together.
MARY HUNT:
What kind of things can you do together that you couldn't do separately?
ERIN BELL:
I think what's truly special about this college is that when you think about the spectrum of what we need to understand to improve health and well-being we have starting with our bench scientists, and the work they do in the primary biological mechanisms and the measurement of environmental concentrations in the population, the fate and transport of those exposures on to epidemiology, where we study what prevents, what are the risk factors for outcomes, what could be preventative for disease, and then our social behavior and health policy and policy, and then our clinicians, right, our clinical social workers, our nurses, our social welfare folks who are trained in policy and social determinants to help us understand how we can work together in that collaborative team to solve problems. So in my own research I look at environmental exposures, particularly perfluorinated chemicals and contamination in a community and at any given moment, I'm working collaboratively with the chemists. I'm working with our community engaged specialist. I'm working with clinicians now. I'm providing information to those who set policy and make recommendations for care in a community that has had this experience, and so if we didn't have that opportunity and for research, and therefore the opportunity to teach and train students to understand one another's vocabulary, understand one another's research culture and treatment culture, and how we interact with both individuals and at the population level, it would be much harder to do if we weren't in one integrated college. So this really helps us to enhance our ability to serve the public.
VICKY RIZZO:
And I think, you know, I'm an alumni of this school, my MSW and PhD and I had the great fortune of my PhD mentor having a joint appointment in the School of Public Health and the School of Social Welfare. So most of my doctoral training, my courses were in the School of Public Health, because my mentor was, this is the sphere you want to work in. You need to understand the language. And I think that is, you know, Erin spoke to that. It's that we need to understand each other's language to solve these, these problems. And you know, my research, you know, I learned about health economics. I learned about all these things from public health that have served me well in my teaching and also in my research and in my clinical work with clients. And I think that's what we want to bring to the college. Many of our faculty see the benefits of this, of working together, because, like Erin said, we have the whole spectrum, from the individual level clinical work to population science to basic science to all of it is really kind of amazing.
MARY HUNT:
Erin, you serve… you come from the public health side. You serve as the dean. And Vicky, you serve as vice dean. Vicky, Erin touched on some of her research interest. Talk a little bit about your background and your specialization.
VICKY RIZZO:
Sure, so my research has focused on healthcare interventions for mainly older adults, so I have studied several interventions that have been delivered in community agencies. I always partner with community agencies. So I've done elder abuse interventions, the advanced illness care coordination intervention with Kaiser Permanente. I've done a lot of work with the Jewish Association Serving the Aging. But my work is really focused on how does social work make a unique contribution to patient outcomes in the health arena on interdisciplinary teams. So when I was at Columbia University, most of the students I worked with were from the School of Public Health. I mean, they were my research partners. So my work is very grounded in the community. I see community partners as equal partners, equal collaborators. They have equal opportunities to publish, to speak their mind, to give me feedback. But my great passion is older adults.
MARY HUNT:
How many faculty members does this bring together?
ERIN BELL:
We have just about 100 faculty who are DOH researchers who also serve as faculty for our college, and this is part of our special partnership that we have with the New York State Department of Health, and then for our UAlbany hired full-time faculty, we're about, I think, about 50 faculty that we have, and we have 1,000 students right now across multiple degree programs, with the new college and with plans to grow, especially as we add more nursing programs and more interdisciplinary programs. We have a joint MSW/MPH degree and we're looking forward to growing those opportunities, as well as other opportunities with our partnerships across the board and with our academic interdisciplinary approach.
MARY HUNT:
This is not the first collaboration you've done. You have been collaborating… your faculty for several years together on a number of projects. Can you talk a little bit about some of the projects you have worked on before together and how maybe that sort of positioned you to go forward with this?
ERIN BELL:
Vicky, do you want to talk about Accord?
VICKY RIZZO:
Sure. So, you know, I returned, like six years ago, and so we have Carmen Murano and Tomoko Udo who have worked with the county of Albany on the ACCORD program, which brings together EMS personnel and social workers and case managers to de-escalate people with severe mental illness so they don't end up in the police system, in jail when they should be elsewhere. That has been a long-standing project, and it's been funded not only by the county but also by the New York State Health Foundation. So that's one area. The other area that you know we have had collaboration is we both have strong faculty in the area of aging and minority health so one of the centers that we have, research centers that we have is the Center for the Elimination of Health Disparities, and Elizabeth Vasquez in public health is the director. I'm the director of the Center for Healthy Aging. We both have really strong research and practice experience in aging. Also, Yuchi Young also has this experience. So we have a very strong base in aging, but we also have very strong experience with Janine Jurkowski and myself and Carmen Murano and a bunch of other faculty in interprofessional work which is so necessary in this society right now, because nothing can be siloed. You all have to work together to solve these huge societal problems. So those things existed before the integration of the college. I think that once we are all in the same building, it will be even easier to collaborate together.
MARY HUNT:
You touched on the minority health research that your units have done, and I know you was asked by the governor several years back around time of COVID to delve deeper into this issue of minority health disparities throughout our region. How has that influenced or impacted the work that you do together and maybe your planning for the future?
ERIN BELL:
Yeah, I think an important aspect to highlight now is we study health disparities across the board. So we often see, unfortunately, health disparities between those who live in rural areas and suburban areas, for example, with regards to access to care. We see differences in disease occurrence, I certainly again have seen disease, excuse me, exposure differences between rural and urban and suburban families, but we also see disparities with veterans, for adults with different disabilities and neurological differences, as well as some of our largest disparities in reproductive outcomes, which is an area I work in, with low birth weight babies, for example, or premature birth we often see we're growing, unfortunately, we're growing across the board, for all women, in these types of outcomes and these types of adverse experiences. They have increased since the pandemic, but we've seen a particularly large disparity between our black women who have the same experience as me, and white women, controlling for all other factors. And so, with our experiences in our colleges, what we want to try and do is eliminate those disparities. And if we can eliminate that disparity, we improve the outcomes for everybody. And that is really what our emphasis is about. But again, we're not limited in the health service we look at is really we are focused on all communities and any disparity. It is contingent on both of our fields to really highlight it and understand why because there should be no differences in health experiences based on who you are, where you live, and that is really our goal, is to eliminate those and to develop and understand corrections and implement treatments or other types of resources and change systems to allow us to make sure that we build health, healthy and well communities, regardless of who you are, where you live.
MARY HUNT:
Vicky and Erin, what opportunities does the new college present for community, engaged research, teaching and learning? You've touched on it a little bit. But are there specific ideas you have in mind, or projects that are sort of on your wish list, or that you think we're best positioned at this time to tackle these kins of issues?
ERIN BELL:
One of the newest ideas in plans we're putting into place… we're very excited about as you know… we're building out our nursing programs at the College of Integrated Sciences, and we have been working hard on proposals for what we call simulation laboratories. So this is an area where we can do live simulation. So social work does this very well where they bring in actors to interact with our students on a number of issues, but we can also incorporate some of our AI tools and some of our interfaces that way. And what we've talked about… these simulation labs are very common in clinical training in terms of understanding the human body, understanding what a heart murmur sounds like for example, but what we'd like to do is expand out, given our expertise to train our students across all three disciplines in a poverty simulation, for example, understanding what lower income contributes and how people need to respond in working with communities who have lower wealth and don't have access to certain health care systems or other systems, affordable housing, for example, and how that impacts their health. We also have an opportunity that I'm particularly excited about related to our Center on Healthy Aging is if you have families who are at a bedside of an older family member and you need to interact with both the nurse and a clinical social worker, how do you do that? And what does that mean for those two students who are training in those disciplines, and how do they need to understand one another? But from a community engagement what we're really looking forward to is now being a resource for our community partners regionally to come in and say, okay, if we do have, say, a public health emergency, can we provide that training for the community, or if a community reaches out to us and says, how do we interact. How do we develop health communication around public health emergencies or on other types of social interactions that we need to deal with? Can we have that training? Can we work with you and partner with you on what is needed? So we're particularly excited to be a resource for both community organizations as well as community members as we build out these ideas. And I think that really is something that will be unique and important as we grow and move forward with this new college.
MARY HUNT:
Talk a little bit about the relationship you have with New York State Department of Health and Office of Mental Health.
ERIN BELL:
So this is our 40th anniversary of the partnership with the New York State Department of Health. We were created… what was really the idea from Commissioner Axelrod at the time, and the idea was to bring together academic public health, those training students in public health, and those in government service in research to our communities, which is what A state health department is. We're the only partnership that is this of this structure in the country, and it has allowed, over time, our students to have hands on applied training in public health. They not only work in internships but do research alongside our scientists that are working in the Wadsworth Laboratory, which is the second largest public health laboratory in the country, very important for understanding how public health emergencies and the important work that they do in the laboratory to develop testing kits, but also to measure different exposures to like lead, for example, in our children, so our students are able to work alongside our DOH researchers. And our DOH researchers are also teachers, and they come in and talk about their experiences and train our students in those experiences. And of course, it helps open up a pipeline for opportunities for employment after their training is complete here at the school and also serves as a wonderful foundation for those who work across the country in a variety of roles. We're really excited to add social welfare and nursing to that partnership. We're working with the Health Department now on that update, because again that'll broaden opportunities. It will enhance opportunities for certainly the DOH researchers and practitioners to have interactions with students to work in partnership on these projects and to train our students and in what is certainly an area of great need.
MARY HUNT:
And Vicky, you have a similar partnership with the NYS Office of Mental Health.
VICKY RIZZO:
Yes, so we're very excited that now that we're in the Integrated College, that it will expand our opportunities in the Department of Health, which is so needed in social welfare, but we have had a very long-standing relationship with the Office of Mental Health. Eric HardIman, one of our faculty members, along with professional staff member Linda Mertz, has been running … they're the state coordinating site for what is called the Evidence Based Practice Initiative, which is in many schools of social welfare. It provides internships to students in their second-year field placement to learn evidence-based practices in mental health. There are courses they have to take. They get stipends. And we participate as a program member, but we also are the state coordinating site for the entire program. And Dr. Hardiman also has a… it's in its twelfth year, a grant for veterans, which is the peer-to-peer support grant, which is now a legislative… It's actually in the governor's budget. It's a permanent line item in the governor's budget. So he does work with doctoral students. And in all 64 counties, they have these programs, so very long-standing relationships. We also have a pretty long-standing relationship with the New York State Department of Aging that, you know, the Office for Aging, which we have internships with our Internships in Aging Project, which were, that's internships for second-year social welfare students to specialize in aging. We're very excited and hope to expand that to public health internships as well, and we have a long-standing relationship also with the Office of Children and Family Services.
MARY HUNT:
You mentioned nursing, and nursing is A relatively new area of study at UAlbany, but you are ramping up quickly, and you are really trying to meet the needs of the community and organizations and hospitals in this area. Tell us a little bit about your efforts in terms of nursing… what programs you offer.
ERIN BELL:
We’re very excited about our nursing program and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out, because I know they might be listening, we did have at UAlbany a nursing program up until the mid-1970s and many of the alumni have actually been great supporters and helpers to us as we bring back and build up our capacity to train nurses. So we currently have two programs that are active at the undergraduate level. So for those who have their RN and need to finish a bachelor's in nursing within 10 years of earning their RN, which is a current standard have what we call a completion degree, and so that degree is designed to be flexible, so they can be working and complete the remaining two years to earn that BSN from the University of Albany. We also have a partnership with St. Peter's Hospital School… College of Nursing that they have, and that is called a 1+2+1. This is a program we brought on with the closure of St. Rose. The College of St. Rose had a 1+2+1 program with St. Peter's. We worked very hard with the college as well as with our SUNY partners here and in New York State to bring that program to the University at Albany. And what this entails is that students who enter in as freshmen will ultimately earn an associate's degree from the St. Peter's program of nursing as well as a bachelor's degree from the University at Albany, and so they will complete that program within a four-year time frame and complete their clinical rotations in their training at St. Peter's. We're currently working on four-year bachelor's degree for nursing that would be a partnership with Albany Medical Health Systems, and we're very excited about that partnership, and again, working very closely with them, growing our opportunities for our students and faculty in both institutions to work together to train nurses and enjoy this partnership where we can also complete research and do research together, and have really enjoyed building that out, and that should be coming very shortly. We're working very quickly and very hard to get that in line.
MARY HUNT:
What would you say were the most challenging aspects of the integration and what was easier than you thought it would be?
ERIN BELL:
What was easiest was our mission, vision and values. And even though we come at health and well-being for communities and individuals from completely different lenses in some ways, we're on the same page with our mission and our vision. We and our students are very focused on improving lives of people, and all people, and working in collaboration with communities, because in order to improve public health, as well as well-being, you have to engage with the public, and we do that, and we're very committed to that, and we're very committed to training the next generation of practitioners. I think in terms of challenges we had different structures. We have now three different accrediting bodies that we answer to. So public health is accredited with a national organization, as is social welfare and nursing, and they're very different. So we're getting used to what we have to do, and when you're accredited, it's actually a strength of any program that does have accreditation because your curriculum has very strict guidelines. You have to constantly review and assess your curriculum and your and ensuring that your students are meeting certain standards for training and making sure that they are well-trained for what they need to do in their profession. And so there's a lot of work that we do within the college to make sure that that's successful. And we've certainly enjoyed for social welfare and for public health for many, many years, have always enjoyed full accreditation and excellent feedback from our national bodies, and I'm anticipating the same with nursing. So that is, it adds more work and just learning how we do things. And now we're, you know, in the weeds of some things like bylaws, which we’re, regardless of who you're in or what you're in, always take more time and just learning we're still in two physical different locations, and so that makes it a bit… that's probably the most challenging piece, at least for me, trying to spend time in two locations and see everyone. And of course, with public health we've always been in multiple locations across the Capital Region with our Health Department colleagues, so it's just spending a lot of time trying to maneuver. And while Zoom helps, it's not as fulfilling as being in person with people. So that's something I think we'll continue to work on.
MARY HUNT:
You work well together. I wonder what… what accounts for that?
VICKY RIZZO:
So can I say one thing about, you know, I think probably, and Erin, you can disagree with me, if you want. But the most difficult thing, I think, which was a little surprising to us, is what the name of the college should be.
ERIN BELL:
Absolutely, yeah, we thought that’d be a piece of cake.
VICKY RIZZO:
We thought it would be a piece of cake, and it wasn't. And we wanted the name of the college to be very future-oriented, raise the visibility of all of us. And you know, we had two incredible co-chairs of that committee who really worked hard. You know, I think the name we have is a really good name, but it was not easy to get there.
MARY HUNT:
What did have you observed in your experiences, whether it's events, whether it's feedback you've gotten from communities or community partners that have told you public engagement needs to move toward a different model or needs to become more interdisciplinary?
ERIN BELL:
Yeah, the external feedback has been all positive, all positive. And more often than not, it's finally, you're doing that, or I wish we were doing that, or that's great. How can I help? And how can I participate? And so it's, I can't think of any external partner that hasn't been enthusiastic. So with that, that provides a lot of, obviously, positive energy for us and as we go forward and it’s been very helpful to have that positive feedback and lots of support from our accrediting bodies and organizations and our national organizations, again, just working with us and really very excited and supportive of what we're doing. I'm always amazed when I go meet with community members, as well as our community organizations, and how enthusiastic they are and really excited about what we can do together and bringing our science and expertise to them so that we can build something stronger and better and get that feedback and partner on solutions. And that's really what's at the heart of what we're doing. We're trying to find solutions that work for people and work for communities. And you can't do that unless you work with one another and partner and consider the impacts across the board and in different ways. And so it it's challenging. It takes a long time to build those relationships and those partnerships. You have to build trust. You have to listen. You have to be willing to be flexible and to understand that communities need different things. I look at access to healthcare in a rural area and access to health care in an urban area, but the causes of the lack of access to care and the solutions to improving that access to care are going to be quite different, and so I need to be able to work in partnership with those communities to develop solutions for them on that. And that's something that we are excited to bring to the table. Tremendous partnerships and support from our partners, and they cheer us on and as and it's always, it's just a very positive, great relationship, and I'm excited to bring that training to the students.
VICKY RIZZO:
Adding on to what Erin has said, I think one of the strengths Erin and I bring as a team is that we… both our entire careers have been built… I don't know how to work any other way than collaboratively with other disciplines. I started my career in a hospital working on a team with multiple disciplines. I had to understand their language. They had to understand mine to get people home and healthy, and in my work with community partners, it's been the same way. So I think the thing we have in common is we both… neither one of us knows how to work any other way. This is the way you bring about change to make communities healthier.
MARY HUNT:
Erin, I understand that eventually the College of integrated Health Sciences, all components of it, will be located on the Uptown Campus. Is that correct? And where do you stand in that process right now?
ERIN BELL:
We are moving to the Uptown Campus and we're very excited. This June, the public health departments as well as the Cancer Research Center will be moving to the Uptown Campus, and so we're cleaning out closets. We’re cleaning out basements. We've been here for quite some time on the Health Science Campus, and so we're excited about this opportunity. Our undergraduate students are already on the Uptown Campus, and so this will allow us to really have a much closer partnership with them and training with them. It'll allow our undergraduate students to interact with our graduate students more frequently, as well as with our partners in biology as well as in the RNA Institute who we enjoy a close relationship with. So it really does open up the doors, and then Social Welfare will join us in about two years as we build out the building a little bit more and create a plan for our research centers as well as our colleagues in social welfare.
MARY HUNT:
Also, the university is planning a health innovation and technology research building on its Uptown Campus to be built in the next few years. And how might that relate to the work that the College of Integrated Health Sciences is doing?
ERIN BELL:
We're very excited about the prospects for that new building, particularly with the addition of laboratory space for our chemistry colleagues, as you know, for especially for nursing and our anticipated growth in offering other health-related clinical programs moving forward, That's an important aspect to their training as well as other types of interdisciplinary work and laboratory work that and high-tech work that we've all discussed over the last half-hour will contribute to both our training and research opportunities For our students, and so we're excited about that possibility and the growing interdisciplinary work and training that it'll provide
MARY HUNT:
These are really bold moves and ambitious plans, strategic plans that will really contribute to the work of the university as a public research university that's serving its communities and available to be a partner.
ERIN BELL:
We're very excited. We're very appreciative of the support from leadership and from our local community and certainly from the New York State Department of Health and Office of Mental Health. We think this is a very positive move our opportunity to grow and enhance our ability to serve the public, which is why we're here, will only grow, and we're very appreciative and thankful for that opportunity.
MARY HUNT:
We have a new presidential administration and things are still evolving, playing out, but I think regardless of what your politics are the reality seems to be that there may be less or different funding for public health initiatives and that may impact community engagement, the community engagement we can do at the university. How are you factoring that into the planning that you're doing? Or how do you think that may impact the choices you have to make in terms of the community engagement that that you prioritize and the partnerships that you pursue?
ERIN BELL:
Yeah, so obviously, I've had a lot of conversations, as has Vicky, over the last couple of weeks with our faculty and students. And the bottom line is our we are staying true to our mission. We are building partnerships and working very collaboratively with all of our communities because all of our communities deserve to have a healthy life and to have excellent access to healthcare and to work with us to eliminate any disparities that may be exhibited because of who they are or where they live, and that needs regardless of who is in leadership positions that's always our goal. We have experts at our college who specialize in children's health. We have experts in aging. We have experts in the health of veterans and men's health and policy implications. So we have a lot to contribute and regardless of the different types of political rhetoric which can be quite difficult to hear for us, the reality is we're still working, and we will partner with people. We have work to do. Unfortunately, people are going to be sick. Unfortunately, people and communities need us. I think what we have learned is the importance of understanding how we communicate and explaining who we are and what we do. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of what we stand for and what we mean when we talk about the elimination of health disparities, for example, or what we mean by public health and what it really is, and what we mean by social work and what that is. And so we have work to do, and that's in essence, what I told faculty and students this week. I said, get to work. We have work to do. We have to understand why people don't think we support them, and we have to understand why people aren't quite ready to trust us, and we have to correct that, and we will keep moving forward and doing that work because, at the end of the day our mission hasn't changed, and that is to improve the health and well-being for all people.
VICKY RIZZO:
You know, we also have a history in our disciplines with working with LGBTQ trans populations, you know, populations in rural health. We're not going to not continue that mission, and we are going to support our faculty and our students in asking the hard questions that they want to explore and research and also in, you know, practice. How do we help people?
MARY HUNT:
What role might AI play in your school's work going forward.
ERIN BELL:
So again, just like with all of our specialties across the board in the college, we have folks who do use and conduct research using AI tools and teach AI as part of our initiatives across the campus. We have new faculty in social welfare as well as in our biostatistics and departments with our college who are in the process of developing additional classes in AI training. It is a tool that we use and using more frequently, certainly as we do our work and again, teaching our undergraduate students with opportunities to understand how AI will impact them now and moving forward into the future. So we're very involved with the AI initiative on campus. We have faculty with the specialized training, and they're able to teach and train our students. So this is a very exciting time. It's a very different time. I'm getting used to AI myself. It's not something I've used a great deal. But again, I think the implications and our ability to, again, once again, be part, full participants in university initiatives. It is something that's very important.
VICKY RIZZO:
With AI, I think, where public health and social work can play… next week, in a week or so, NYU is hosting an AI and the public good conference for deans and directors of schools of public health and social work, which I will be attending, which I'm very much looking forward to because I still have much to learn about AI. But I think one of the places where social welfare and public health are really important… I've been involved with the Global Center for AI and Mental Health. There are some folks in social welfare who are doing research in this area, and where the data you collect with AI is only as good as the questions you ask. And what we know from studies that have been done in child welfare and also policing is that the questions are biased, so that the data you get to make decisions with AI may already have built into it implicit bias, racism because of the questions that you're asking, and so that the decisions that police make or child welfare workers make is based on biased information. It doesn't take into account the fact that people can change over time, for example. So that I think where public health and social welfare can be really helpful is in talking with colleagues in computer science… you have to help us understand what are the questions we need to ask so that the data that we're gathering is the best data to make decisions.
MARY HUNT:
You think of public health and social welfare, you don't necessarily think of it as a high-tech area, though I know there's great scientific study and advancements through both fields, but you think of it as a very people, person-to-person, hands-on kind of areas. And it's interesting to introduce AI to that and to see how that can advance your work, your engagement.
ERIN BELL:
Right and I think that, again that speaks to the importance of interdisciplinary work. And again, we have that full spectrum of that kind of the hands-on person-to-person interaction, but also the population level work that is so important in what we do in epidemiology and biostatistics, and then with the bench science and AI tools are critical in those disciplines in particular for helping us understand risk factors of disease and also how our solutions or proposed solutions, whether or not they're successful, so we can, if we learn, for example, that having support postpartum for people who have given birth can help reduce postpartum adverse effects, so postpartum hemorrhage, postpartum maternal outcomes that we need to monitor, we can then look to see if there is a prenatal precursor risk factor for those things like stress. Well, if that, we can now measure stress postpartum and then do that analysis both at the cellular level but also at the even harkening back to some of the epigenetic changes in the laboratory and use some AI techniques to measure those changes. And so it really is when we talk about full circle and interdisciplinary work that's a team where you have everyone from a bench scientist to an epidemiologist to our social behavior experts to try and come up with a solution and test to see if it's successful. So again, this is a model that we'll be able to really lean into with our college and with our enhanced capacity with AI and our tools here at the university.
MARY HUNT:
What advice do you have for other institutions that may be looking ahead and anticipating new challenges to implementing and or continuing their community engagement for whatever reasons, whether those are political, those are funding, those are other resource limited challenges? What’s your advice to them?
VICKY RIZZO:
I think, regardless of the administration or the political headwinds or all of those things, I mean, the most important thing, at least in my work with community partners is you go to that community and say, how can I help you? How can we help you? What are the things you have questions about, what are the needs that your community has, that you want us to partner with you on to develop solutions. Regardless of all the other things, that is the most important thing. It has to be about the community, and you are going there to help the community. The other approach where I have this wonderful solution that I'm going to come in and fix your community, just never works.
[VICKY RIZZO LAUGHS]
ERIN BELL:
And really, it'll be stronger, and it will be it will be sustainable if you build relationships like that, and you will find ways to continue it together and going in, it is you are to serve. We are here to serve and that is our role. We are a public institution. This is our responsibility.
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ERIN BELL:
We are here to teach. We are here to support all of our communities and all of our students and our partners. And how can we best do that, and with that exercise, and with that commitment to that discipline and being very intentional about building your community engagement. It will sustain these changes and you will be stronger in your work because of it.
MARY HUNT:
Erin Bell and Vicky Rizzo of the College of integrated Health Sciences, thanks for being my guest today. You are a dynamic duo.
ERIN BELL:
Thank you.
VICKY RIZZO:
Thank you so much.
ANNOUNCER/MARY HUNT:
Professor Erin Bell is the Dean of the College of Integrated Health Sciences at the University at Albany. Professor Victoria Rizzo is senior vice dean of the college and director of the college’s School of Social Welfare. For more information on today’s guests and the College of Integrated Health Sciences visit the resource page for this podcast online at the dash engagement dash ring dot simplecast dot com. The Engagement Ring is produced by the University at Albany's Office for Public Engagement. If you have questions or comments or want to share an idea for an upcoming podcast, email us at UAlbany O P E at Albany dot E D U.
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