Oregon Healthy WorkForce Center Opens
It is a new NIOSH Center of Excellence in Portland that will use team- and technology-based interventions to foster improved lifestyle choices, safer work, and better psychological and physical health.
A new NIOSH Center of Excellence, the Oregon Healthy WorkForce Center, has opened in Portland this month with the theme of Intervention Effectiveness, promising to use team- and technology-based interventions to foster improved lifestyle choices, safer work, and better psychological and physical health.
It is a collaboration of the Oregon Health & Science University's Center for Research on Occupational and Environmental Toxicology (CROET); Portland State University's Occupational Health Psychology program and Center for Health Research; and the University of Oregon's Labor Education Research Center.
The center's work dovetails with Total Worker Health, a NIOSH initiative appropriate for the 21st Century: It seeks to integrate health protection with health promotion.
NIOSH's Twitter page welcomed the center's arrival and provided a link to its website. Digging a bit there produces a list of the center's leaders and the members of its External Advisory Committee:
- Tom Becker, MD, Ph.D. (Oregon Health & Science University/Chair, Public Health & Preventive Medicine)
- Mark R. Cullen, MD (Stanford University/Chief of General Medicine)
- Jae P. Douglas, MSW, Ph.D. (Oregon Public Health Division, Research & Education Services Section Manager)
- Chuck Easterly, BS, ARM (SAIF Corporation, Loss Control Director/worker's compensation insurance)
- Leda Isabel Garside, RN, MBA (Tuality Heathcare ¡Salud! Services)
- Joseph J. Hurrell, Ph.D. (Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology)
- John Mohlis (Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council)
- Noah Seixas, Ph.D., MS (University of Washington/Director, NIOSH ERC)
- Ronald L. Tubby, MS, MBA, CIH, CSP (Intel Corporation)
CROET, meanwhile, is choosing a new director, and the OHSU search committee has narrowed a field of 180 people to two finalists who are about to give lectures at OHSU. They'll meet with OHSU faculty and its vice president for research, who will then make the final selection with input from CROET and other OHSU faculty.
Helmut Zarbl, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, is scheduled to speak on Genetic and Epigenetic Regulation of Breast Cancer Susceptibility: Mechanisms, Biomarkers and Translational Studies on Sept. 30 at noon. Steven A. Shea, Ph.D., associate professor in the Harvard Medical School Department of Medicine, is scheduled to speak Oct. 10 at noon on Influence of the Internal Circadian System on Human Disease.