GSDM faculty member to co-lead Focused Research Program
A Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine (GSDM) faculty member has received funding for a Focused Research Program (FRP) focusing on simulation modeling for population health through the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University. The Hariri Institute for Computing’s Focused Research Programs (FRPs) support intensive, faculty-driven efforts in large, multi-disciplinary teams; the year-long programs are designed to facilitate research convergence by providing scaffolding for groups to coalesce in sustainable ways, with the goal of accelerating research for future funding and broader impact.
Dr. Brenda Heaton, associate professor in the Department of Health Policy & Health Services Research and in Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, will lead the FRP along with her co-lead, Wesley Wildman, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Theology and Ethics in the School of Theology and the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. Their proposal was one of just two chosen by the Hariri Institute.
Heaton said that the FRP model provides a much-needed link for research applying these methods by helping investigators find the collaborators that they might need for their work.
“It’s been a challenge, as an investigator, to be able to identify the technical expertise that I need on my teams to develop and build the models that I’m interested in building,” Heaton said. “I’ve outsourced that to people outside of the university, while knowing that [that expertise] must exist at BU…I’ve just been unable to readily identify the right fit.”
With the FRP, Heaton and other researchers can find others who are interested in working with simulation modeling, a process that helps researchers understand how different parts in a system interact.
“The way that one part of the system behaves affects how another part behaves…and when we try to make sense of what’s coming out of that system, we can’t necessarily look at the individual parts,” Heaton said. “We have to understand how those parts work together.”
According to Heaton, simulation modeling gives researchers the opportunity to learn about the relative importance of system components and their function in a way that they can identify novel opportunities for intervention.
Simulation modeling is particularly helpful in the area of population health, in which researchers want to understand what factors are causing the distribution of health outcomes that they see at the population level, according to Heaton.
“It’s like a little playground for developing and targeting public health interventions, and for addressing other issues or gaps that we have in understanding population health,” Heaton said.
Heaton is primarily focused on oral health disparities, particularly in young children, and the mechanisms and processes that produce these disparities.
“I see disparities as emerging from a system of influences: what’s happening with the child, their caregiver, the influence of the caregiver’s social network, the care settings, the ability to access the care and how the receipt of care is influenced by all of those things,” Heaton said. “When I think about it from a systems perspective, I want to put all of those pieces together to understand the mechanisms and processes that work together to shape the population distribution of disease. Simulation modeling is the natural go-to for creating that space. And once a model is developed, we can make better sense of where there’s opportunity for intervention and what the impact of that intervention would be immediately and over time.”
Heaton said the FRP provides an opportunity for collaboration and change in the fields of population and public health.
“It’s exciting to see people come out of the woodwork who are interested in these methods or are using these methods in cool and interesting ways,” Heaton said. “It’s exciting to see the energy, the enthusiasm and all of the opportunity that could come from it.”