WVU Health Sciences faculty invited to participate in adaptive sustainable health workshop

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has engaged UIDP, a non-profit (501c3) membership organization comprised of leading innovation companies and research-intensive universities, to develop and facilitate a workshop on adaptive sustainable health. The workshop, “Building a Biotechnology Innovation Ecosystem for Adaptive and Sustainable Health,” is intended to identify partnership strategies to create a sustainable healthy human ecosystem and an integrated system-of-systems approach to solve physical, mental and social health problems.

WVU Health Sciences faculty have been invited to join this interdisciplinary group of scientists and sector leaders from the public, private and international arenas. The workshop will be held May 10-11, 2022, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST via a virtual conferencing platform. Please register by May 2, 2022.

Expertise from academia, industry and the public sector bring important perspectives and expertise to this topic. Accordingly, the NSF is coordinating efforts to develop partnerships to advance the bioeconomy ecosystem. To achieve this goal in our lifetime will require rapid technological innovation, which can only be achieved when transformative discoveries from basic science and engineering research are translated to practice.

The goal of this workshop is to help understand and design what would an adaptive and sustainable healthy human ecosystem look like. Four key themes will be explored:

1. Systems Analysis, including understanding the impacts of various regional and local challenges and pressures on the quality and resilience of healthy human ecosystems, broadly defined and across a range of spatial, temporal, social and economic scales; defining critical thresholds and interconnections of environmental, agricultural, industrial and civic infrastructure and services that support the health dynamics of human ecosystems; identifying measures of system resilience and adaptive health capacity to changing environments and socio-economic conditions; assessing efficacy and adaptability through system-of-systems approaches and life cycle analysis and modeling.
2. Managed Systems, including development of biotechnology, bio-inspired and synthetic biology innovations to enhance and sustain healthy human ecosystems. Managed systems include, but are not limited to, healthcare, agriculture/food production, transportation, air, water, waste, housing, human services, information technology, manufacturing, construction, and education. Examples of biotechnological innovations include precision and urban agriculture for more accessible, secure, and sustainable food sourcing without increasing waste; technologies to improve water quality and security, and to enable resource recovery; novel materials and manufacturing for lower waste and emissions; environmentally responsible and sustainable buildings and infrastructure; enhanced transportation capacity with lower health and environmental impacts; improvements in quality, affordability and access to modern healthcare.
3. Natural Systems, including bio-inspired design and nature-based solutions to revive and sustain natural resources that are the ecological foundations of healthy human ecosystems, and whose degradation undermines many determinants of human health and exacerbates health disparities. Examples include biotechnological innovations that mitigate risks and sustainably reduce the impact of human communities on natural systems; monitor and remedy land, water, and air pollution; limit or reverse the loss of biodiversity; increase resilience of natural systems facing climate change.
4. Human systems, including the individual and social needs for biotechnology and bioeconomy-enabled healthy human ecosystems. Understanding and improving the relationships between biotechnology and society are critical to the development, awareness, acceptance, and adoption of innovative solutions to challenges facing the health of human communities. Examples include enhanced learning and communication of biotechnology across various educational sectors to support a better-informed society, effective community engagement and future STEM workforce development; interdisciplinary research and development that partners biotechnology with the social and behavioral sciences.

Subject matter expertise: Life sciences, systems biology, biomedical science and engineering, computing, AI/ML, networking, human-computer-interaction, bio-inspired view of human ecosystems, biotechnology industry, biomedical industry, environmental microbiology, synthetic biology and bioengineering, genetic engineering, chemical biology and engineering, industrial biomanufacturing, public health, public policy, environmental science and engineering, predictive physical and theoretical modeling, social and behavioral sciences, including psychology, anthropology. Regulatory, including EPA, USDA, and FDA.

We hope you will join us as we seek your feedback as a valuable member of our community and tackle workshop themes in a facilitated discussion.