Panel: Serving Different Populations

Meeting the needs of graduate students systematically and intentionally can be a daunting strategic initiative. The students’ interests, expertise, and career objectives can vary greatly. Understanding and addressing gaps in their knowledge can an insurmountable obstacle, seemingly, as well. Politically there may be silos to contend and barriers to perception of “what libraries can do.” We would like to propose a panel discussion where different institutions discuss the wins and losses of reaching different graduate populations. The objective of the panel discussion is to openly share the strategies that have worked for different populations, as well as strategies that can be scaled and tailored depending on the needs of the groups served. Samantha Walsh of Icahn School of Medicine brings the perspective of an urban academic medical center, medical school, and graduate school which includes professional programs, dual-degree programs, and joint programs with other institutions. We have also been in conversation with Mou Chakraborty of Salisbury University Libraries who serves both pre-professional and social science departments. Mandy Havert from Notre Dame University also serves of the graduate students at her university. Roman Koshykar works exclusively with Computer Science students. Moderator will be Nastasha Johnson of Purdue University, and will ask questions such as: 1) what, by far, as been your campus’s greatest achievement in reaching graduate students, 2) what service or tool did your institution try that was a blaring error, 3) in a perfect world, what do you need the most to have the greatest impact on graduate services, and 4) does your institution have a strategic plan for reaching graduate students or for outreach. The goal of the panel presentation is for those who attend and those who present to learn for each other and craft new ideas that can scaled accordingly for their individual home institutions

Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security