UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Diana Fishbein, director of the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center and C. Eugene Bennett Chair in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State, will be one of the primary speakers at the second annual symposium for the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Translational Research in Children’s Mental Health.
The conference, “Moving Toward Precision Healthcare in Children’s Mental Health: New Perspectives, Methodologies and Technologies in Therapeutics and Prevention,” will take place Oct. 5-7.
Fishbein will discuss how emerging research has extraordinary potential for preventing behavioral problems and promoting resilience, which also has significant implications for the next generation of precision-based, prevention-focused personalized interventions.
A leading scientist in the field of translational neuroscience, Fishbein will present “Personalizing and Optimizing Intervention Models via a Translational Neuroscience Framework.” She will introduce a six-phase, integrative, conceptual framework developed specifically for prevention science to guide the construction of precision-based interventions, conduct comparative effectiveness trials, and institutionalize them to achieve broad impact.
“Personalization should encompass all stages from bench to bedside. Truly, implementation and scaling issues deserve the same attention as basic scientific discoveries,” Fishbein said.
As director of the Program for Translational Research on Adversity and Neurodevelopment, Fishbein’s research utilizes transdisciplinary methods and a developmental approach to understand interactions between neurobiological processes and environmental factors. The goal of translational research is to translate scientific findings to practice and policies designed to prevent mental health, emotional and behavioral problems.
“We want to see a translational, personalized prevention approach compel a more effective and compassionate response to behavioral health problems,” said Fishbein.
Fishbein co-founded the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives, a national organization dedicated to the transfer of knowledge from the basic to the applied sciences as well as practical settings and public health policies. She is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, a faculty subcontractor at Georgetown University, and a guest researcher at the National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program. Fishbein has published about 100 papers and several books.