Guangqing Chi, associate professor of rural sociology and demography and public health sciences, will present “The Generalizability and Replicability of Twitter Data for Population (and Health) Research” at the next Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design Recent Topics in Research Methods Seminar Series on April 23. It will also be streamed to room 2008 at Academic Support Building at Penn State College of Medicine, and online. A streaming link is provided upon registration.

Nilam Ram, professor of human development and family studies, will present “Analysis of Experience Sampling and Ecological Momentary Assessment Data: Part 3: Using Differential Equation and Data Mining Algorithms” at the next Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design Recent Topics in Research Methods Seminar Series. The seminar will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 9, in 116 Henderson Building at University Park.

Bonnie Kent is all about northern Dauphin County. For more than 30 years, she has been active in her hometown communities, currently serving as a community mobilizer with Dauphin County. In this position, she looks for ways to fill gaps of services and engage the community and organizations to work together for positive change. Her commitment and connections to northern Dauphin County made her a perfect addition to the Community-Engaged Research Core of Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute when it was looking for its first community team member.

How adversity early in life can lead to susceptibility to disease will be studied through a project initially funded through Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Bridges to Translation pilot grant program. Idan Shalev, Mark T. Greenberg Early Career Professor for the Study of Children's Health and Development, and assistant professor of biobehavioral health, was recently awarded funding through the National Institute on Aging to better understand how immune cells react and adapt to stress.

The Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute is accepting applications for both its yearlong and summer training programs for students interested in learning the fundamentals of translational science. These programs work to teach the next generation of scientists the skills to move research in the laboratory to benefit patients in the health care system.

Conrad Tucker was giving a talk on the idea of using technology to capture students’ body posture to determine their attention level in the classroom. In the audience was a member of Parkinson’s disease researcher and clinician Xuemei Huang’s research team, who approached Tucker afterward about a connection between his talk and Huang’s research into using changes in a person’s walking gait to diagnose Parkinson’s earlier. The rest, as they say, is history.

Penn State College of Medicine’s Dr. Deepa Sekhar will partner with six urban Pennsylvania public high schools and involve more than 9,000 students in research to address the rise of depression and suicide in children. Sekhar’s team is studying use of a school-based screening for clinical depression and was recently awarded a three-year, $2 million funding award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. The project was developed with help from Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Community Engagement Studios.