Dean Gautam N. Yadama
At the Boston College School of Social Work, we are fortunate to have many partners who share our goal of improving the lives of the most vulnerable. Among the latest: the recently established Boston College Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, which focuses in the areas of energy, health and the environment.
The Schiller Institute is fostering faculty and student cooperation across disciplines and schools at Boston College, strengthening teaching and research in the sciences, and enhancing the University’s ability to advance the common good through research focused on pressing complex problems in the U.S. and around the globe.
For the School of Social Work, the institute provides an ideal platform to reach across disciplines to define, understand, design, and test interventions to solve complex social problems.
Earlier this month, we held a workshop in collaboration with the Schiller Institute and the National Institutes of Health to improve the adoption and sustained use of environmental health interventions using implementation and systems science methodologies. The gathering exemplified “team science” at its best: social and environmental scientists who contribute contextual insights collaborating with systems scientists who bring a feedback perspective to understanding dynamic environmental health problems. (Read the story.)
At BCSSW, our faculty, students, and staff are cognizant of the need to develop new approaches in our teaching and research and innovate to deliver on the promise of improving the lives of the most vulnerable here at home and around the world. Jane Addams summed it up best, “Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.”